MOUNT PLEASANT 8RANGH 



JHr. ^invWs Proge WLxitins^. 



THE STORY OF A BAD BOY. 

PRUDENCE PALFREY. 

THE QUEEN OF SHEBA. 

THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY. 

MARJORIE DAW AND OTHER STORIES. 

FROM PONKAPOG TO PESTH. 

TWO BITES AT A CHERRY, WITH OTHER TALES. 

AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA. 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 



BY 
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1894 



„o.«.-^-«"'""'°'' 



Copyright, 1883 and 1893, 
By T. B. ALDRICH. 

All rights reserved. 



rOURTH EDITION. 






The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotjrped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 






Vo 



,SJSS»^- 



PI SCAT A QUA RIVER 

Thou singest by the gleaming isles, 
By woods, and fields of corn, 
Thou singest, and the sunlight smiles 
TJ'pon my birthday morn. 

But I within a city, I, 
So full of vague unrest, 
Would ahnost give my life to lie 
An hour upon thy breast ! 

To let the ivherry listless go. 
And, wrapt in dreamy joy, 
Dip, and surge idly to and fro, 
Like the, red harbor-buoy ; 

To sit in happy indolence, 

To rest upon the oars. 

And catch the heavy earthy scents 

That blow from summer shores ; 



APBOFBB'Tt 






To see the rounded sun go down, 
And with its parting fires 
Light up the windows of the toivn 
And burn the tapering spires ; 

And then to hear the muffled tolls 
From steeples slim and white, 
And watch, among the Isles of Shoals, 
The Beacon's orange light, 

O River I flowing to the main 
Through woods, and fields of corn. 
Hear thou my longing and my pain 
This sunny birthday morn ; 

And take this song which fancy shapes 
To music like thine own. 
And sing it to the cliffs and capes 
And crags where I am known ! 



CONTENTS 



I. Captain John Smith 1 

II. Along the Water Side ... T 

III. A Stroll about Town ... 22 

IV. A Stroll about Town (continued) . 34 
V. Old Strawberry Bank .... 61 

VI. Some Old Portsmouth Profiles . . 82 

VII. Personal Reiviiniscences .... 105 

Index of Names 125 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 



CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH 

I CALL it an old town, but it is only rela^ 
tively old. When one reflects on the count- 
less centuries that have gone to the for- 
mation of this crust of earth on which we 
temporarily move, the most ancient cities on 
its surface seem merely things of the week 
before last. It was only the other day, then 
— that is to say, in the month of June, 1603 
—that one Martin Pring, in the ship Speed- 
well, an enormous ship of nearly fifty tons 
burden, from Bristol, England, sailed up the 
Piscataqua River. The Speedwell, number- 
ing thirty men, officers and crew, had for 
consort the Discoverer, of twenty-six tons 



2 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

and thirteen men. After following the 
windings of "the brave river" for twelve 
miles or more, the two vessels turned back 
and put to sea again, having failed in the 
chief object of the expedition, which was to 
obtain a cargo of the medicinal sassafras- 
tree, from the bark of which, as was well 
known to our ancestors, could be distilled 
the Elixir of Life. 

It was at some point on the left bank 
of the Piscataqua, three or four miles from 
the mouth of the river, that worthy Master 
Pring probably effected one of his several 
landings. The beautiful stream widens sud- 
denly at this place, and the green banks, 
then covered with a network of strawberry 
vines, and sloping invitingly to the lip of 
the crystal water, must have won the tired 
mariners. 

The explorers found themselves on the 
edge of a vast forest of oak, hemlock, maple, 
and pine ; but they saw no sassafras-trees 
to speak of, nor did they encounter — what 
would have been infinitely less to their taste 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 3 

— any red-men. Here and there were dis- 
coverable the scattered aslies of fires where 
the Lidians had encamped earlier in the 
spring ; they were absent now, at the silvery 
falls, higher up the stream, where fish 
abounded at that season. The soft June 
breeze, laden with the delicate breath of 
wild-flowers and the pungent odors of spruce 
and pine, ruffled the duplicate sky in the 
water ; the new leaves lisped pleasantly in the 
tree tops, and the birds were singing as if 
they had gone mad. No ruder sound or 
movement of life disturbed the primeval soli- 
tude. Master Pring would scarcely recog- 
nize the spot were he to land there to-day. 

Eleven years afterwards a much cleverer 
man than the commander of the Speedwell 
dropped anchor in the Piscataqua — Captain 
John Smith of famous memory. After slay- 
ing Turks in hand-to-hand combats, and 
doing all sorts of doughty deeds wherever 
he chanced to decorate the globe with his 
presence, he had come with two vessels to 
the fisheries on the rocky selvage of Maine, 



4 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

when curiosity, or perhaps a deeper motive, 
led him to examine the neighboring shore 
lines. With eight of his men in a small boat, 
a ship's yawl, he skirted the coast from Pe- 
nobscot Bay to Cape Cod, keeping his eye 
open. This keeping his eye open was a pe- 
culiarity of the little captain ; possibly a fam- 
ily trait. It was Smith who really discovered 
the Isles of Shoals, exploring in person those 
masses of bleached rock — those " isles assez 
hautes,^^ of which the French navigator 
Pierre de Guast, Sieur de Monts, had caught 
a bird's-eye glimpse through the twilight in 
1605. Captain Smith christened the group 
Smith's Isles, a title which j)osterity, with 
singular persistence of ingTatitude, has ig- 
nored. It was a tardy sense of justice that 
expressed itself a few years ago in erecting 
on Star Island a simple marble shaft to the 
memory of John Smith — the multitudi- 
nous ! Perhaps this long delay is explained 
by a natural hesitation to label a monument 
so ambiguously. 

The modern Jason, meanwhile, was not 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 5 

without honor in his own country, whatever 
may have happened to him in his own house, 
for the poet George Wither addressed a copy 
of pompous verses " To his Friend Captain 
Smith, upon his Description of New Eng- 
land." " Sir," he says — 

" Sir : yolir Relations I haue read : whicli shew 
Tker 's reason I should honor them and you : 
And if their meaning I haue vnderstood, 
I dare to censure thus : Tour Project 's good ; 
And. may (if follow'd) doubtlesse quit the paine 
With honour, pleasure and a trebble gaine ; 
Beside the benefit that shall arise 
To make more happy our Posterities." 

The earliest map of this portion of our 
seaboard was prepared by Smith and laid 
before Prince Charles, who was asked to give 
the country a name. He christened it New 
England. In that rather remarkable map the 
site of Portsmouth is called Bull, and Kittery 
and York are known as Boston, 

It was doubtless owing to Captain John 
Smith's representation on his return to Eng- 
land that the Laconia Company selected the 
banks of the Piscataqua for their plantation. 



6 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

Smith was on an intimate footing with Sir 
Ferdinand Gorges, who, five years subse- 
quently, made a tour of inspection along the 
New England coast, in company with John 
Mason, then Governor of Newfoundland. 
One of the results of this summer cruise is 
the town of Portsmouth, among whose leafy 
ways, and into some of whose old-fashioned 
houses, I purpose to take the reader, if he 
have an idle hour on his hands. Should 
we meet the flitting ghost of some old- 
time worthy, on a staircase or at a lonely 
street corner, the reader must be prepared 
for it. 



II 

ALONG THE WATER SIDE 

It is not supposable tliat the early set- 
tlers selected the site of their plantation on 
account of its picturesqueness. They were 
influenced entirely by the lay of the land, 
its nearness and easy access to the sea, and 
the secure harbor it offered to their fishing- 
vessels ; yet they could not have chosen a 
more beautiful spot had beauty been the 
sole consideration. The first settlement was 
made at Odiorne's Point — the Pilgrims' 
Rock of New Hampshire ; there the Manor, 
or Mason's Hall, was built by the Laconia 
Company in 1623. It was not until 1631 
that the Great House was erected by Hum- 
phrey Chadborn on Strawberry Bank. Mr. 
Chadborn, consciously or unconsciously, 
sowed a seed from which a city has sprung. 



8 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

The town of Portsmouth stretches along 
the south bank of the Piscataqua, about two 
miles from the sea as the crow flies — three 
miles following the serpentine course of the 
river. The stream broadens suddenly at 
this point, and at flood tide, lying without a 
ripple in a basin formed by the interlocked 
islands and the mainland, it looks more like 
an inland lake than a river. To the unac- 
customed eye there is no visible outlet. 
Standing on one of the wharves at the foot 
of State Street or Court Street, a stranger 
would at first scarcely suspect the conti- 
guity of the ocean. A little observation, 
however, would show him that he was in a 
seaport. The rich red rust on the gables 
and roofs of ancient buildings looking sea- 
ward would tell him that. There is a fitful 
saline flavor in the air, and if while he 
gazed a dense white fog should come rolling 
in, like a line of phantom breakers, he 
would no longer have any doubts. 

It is of course the oldest part of the town 
that skirts the river, though few of the no- 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 9 

table houses that remain are to be found 
there. Like all New England settlements^ 
Portsmouth was built of wood, and has been 
subjected to extensive conflagrations. You 
rarely come across a brick building that is 
not shockingly modern. The first house of 
the kind was erected by Eichard Wibird to- 
wards the close of the seventeenth century. 

Though many of the old landmarks have 
been swept away by the fateful hand of 
time and fire, the town impresses you as a 
very old town, especially as you saunter 
along the streets down by the river. The 
worm-eaten wharves, some of them covered 
by a sparse, unhealthy beard of grass, and 
the weather-stained, unoccupied warehouses 
are sufficient to satisfy a moderate appetite 
for antiquity. These deserted piers and 
these long rows of empty barracks, with 
their sarcastic cranes projecting from the 
eaves, rather puzzle the stranger. Why this 
great preparation for a commercial activity 
that does not exist, and evidently has not 
for years existed ? There are no ships 



10 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

lying at the pier-heads ; there are no gangs 
of stevedores staggering under heavy cases 
of merchandise ; here and there is a barge 
laden down to the bulwarks with coal, and 
here and there a square-rigged schooner 
from Maine smothered with fragrant planks 
and clapboards ; an imported citizen is fish- 
ing at the end of the wharf, a ruminative 
freckled son of Drogheda, in perfect sym- 
pathy with the indolent sunshine that seems 
to be sole proprietor of these crumbling 
piles and ridiculous warehouses, from which 
even the ghost of prosperity has flown. 

Once upon a time, however, Portsmouth 
carried on an extensive trade with the West 
Indies, threatening as a maritime port to 
eclipse both Boston and New York. At the 
windows of these musty coimting-rooms 
which overlook the river near Spring Mar- 
ket used to stand portly merchants, in knee 
breeches and silver shoe-buckles and plmn- 
colored coats with ruffles at the wrist, waiting 
for their ships to come up the Narrows ; the 
cries of stevedores and the chants of sailors 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 11 

at the windlass used to echo along the shore 
where all is silence now. For reasons not 
worth setting forth, the trade with the Indies 
abruptly closed, having ruined as well as 
enriched many a Portsmouth adventurer. 
This explains the empty warehouses and the 
unused wharves. Portsmouth remains the 
interesting widow of a once very lively com- 
merce. I fancy that few fortunes are either 
made or lost in Portsmouth nowadays. 
Formerly it turned out the best ships, as it 
did the ablest ship captains, in the world. 
There were families in which the love for 
blue water was an immemorial trait. The 
boys were always sailors ; " a gray-headed 
shipmaster, in each generation, retiring 
from the quarter-deck to the homestead, 
while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary 
place before the mast, confronting the salt 
spray and the gale, which had blasted 
against his sire and grandsire." ^ With 
thousands of miles of sea-line and a score 
or two of the finest harbors on the globe, 

1 Hawthorne in his introduction to The Scarlet Letter. 



12 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

we have adroitly turned over our carrying 
trade to foreign nations. 

In other days, as I have said, a high mar- 
itime spirit was a characteristic of Ports- 
mouth. The town did a profitable business 
in the war of 1812, sending out a large fleet 
of the sauciest small craft on record. A 
pleasant story is told of one of these little 
privateers — the Harlequin, owned and com- 
manded by Captain Elihu Brown. The 
Harlequin one day gave chase to a large 
ship, which did not seem to have much fight 
aboard, and had got it into close quarters, 
when suddenly the shy stranger threw open 
her ports, and proved to be His Majesty's 
Ship-of-War Bulwark, seventy-four gims. 
Poor Captain Brown ! 

Portsmouth has several large cotton fac- 
tories and one or two corpulent breweries ; 
it is a wealthy old town, wath a liking for 
first mortgage bonds ; but its warmest lover 
will not claim for it the distinction of being 
a great mercantile centre. The majority of 
her young men are forced to seek other fields 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 13 

to reap, and almost every city in tlie Union, 
and many a city across the sea, can point to 
some eminent merchant, lawyer, or what not, 
as " a Portsmouth boy." Portsmouth even 
furnished the late king of the Sandwich 
Islands, Kekuanaoa, with a prime minister, 
and his nankeen Majesty never had a better. 
The affection which all these exiles cherish 
for their birthplace is worthy of remark. On 
two occasions — in 1852 and 1873, the two 
hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the set- 
tlement of Strawberry Bank — the trans- 
planted sons of Portsmouth were seized with 
an impulse to return home. Simultaneously 
and almost without concerted action, the lines 
of pilgrims took up their march from every 
quarter of the globe, and swept down with 
music and banners on the motherly old town. 
To come back to the wharves. I do not 
know of any spot with such a fascinating 
air of dreams and idleness about it as the 
old wharf at the end of Court Street. The 
very fact that it was once a noisy, busy 
place, crowded with sailors and soldiers — 



14 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

in the war of 1812 — gives an emphasis to 
the quiet that broods over it to-day. The 
lounger who sits of a summer afternoon on 
a rusty anchor fluke in the shadow of one 
of the silent warehouses, and looks on the 
lonely river as it goes murmuring past the 
town, cannot be too grateful to the India 
trade for having taken itseK off elsewhere. 

What a slumberous, delightful, lazy place 
it is ! The sunshine seems to lie a foot 
deep on the planks of the dusty wharf, 
which yields up to the warmth a vague 
perfume of the cargoes of rum, molasses, 
and spice that used to be piled upon it. 
The river is as blue as the inside of a hare- 
bell. The opposite shore, in the strangely 
shifting magic lights of sky and water, 
stretches along like the silvery coast of 
fairyland. Directly opposite you is the navy 
yard, with its neat officers' quarters and 
workshops and arsenals, and its vast ship- 
houses, in which the keel of many a fa- 
mous frigate has been laid. Those monster 
buildings on the water's edge, with their 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 15 

roofs pierced with innumerable little win- 
dows, which blink like eyes in the sunlight, 
are the shiphouses. On your right lies a 
cluster of small islands, — there are a dozen 
or more in the harbor — on the most ex- 
tensive of which you see the fading-away 
remains of some earthworks thrown up in 
1812. Between this — Trefethren's Island 
— and Peirce's Island lie the Narrows. Per- 
haps a bark or a sloop-of-war is making up 
to town ; the hulk is hidden among the is- 
lands, and the topmasts have the effect of 
sweeping across the dry land. On your left 
is a long bridge, more than a quarter of a 
mile in length, set upon piles where the 
water is twenty or thirty feet deep, leading 
to the navy yard and Kittery — the Kittery 
so often the theme of Whittier's verse. 

This is a mere outline of the landscape 
that spreads before you. Its changeful 
beauty of form and color, with the summer 
clouds floating over it, is not to be painted 
in words. I know of many a place where 
the scenery is more varied and striking ; but 



16 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

there is a mandragora quality in the atmos- 
phere here that holds you to the spot, and 
makes the half-hours seem like minutes. I 
could fancy a man sitting on the end of that 
old wharf very contentedly for two or three 
years, provided it could be always June. 

Perhaps, too, one would desire it to be 
always high water. The tide falls from 
eight to twelve feet, and when the water 
makes out between the wharves some of the 
picturesqueness makes out also. A corroded 
section of stovepipe mailed in barnacles, or 
the skeleton of a hoopskirt protruding from 
the tide mud like the remains of some old- 
time wreck, is apt to break the enchantment. 

I fear I have given the reader an exagger- 
ated idea of the solitude that reigns along 
the river-side. Sometimes there is society 
here of an unconventional kind, if you care 
to seek it. Aside from the foreign gentle- 
man before mentioned, you are likely to 
encounter, farther down the shore toward 
the Point of Graves (a burial-place of the 
colonial period), a battered and aged native 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 17 

fisherman boiling lobsters on a little grav- 
elly beach, where the river whispers and 
lisps among the pebbles as the tide creeps in. 
It is a weather-beaten ex-skipper or ex-pilot, 
with strands of coarse hair, like seaweed, 
falling about a face that has the expression 
of a half-open clam. He is always ready to 
talk with you, this amphibious person ; and 
if he is not the most entertaining of gossips 
— more weather-wise than Old Probabili- 
ties, and as full of moving incident as 
Othello himself — then he is not the wintry- 
haired shipman I used to see a few years 
ago on the strip of beach just beyond Lib- 
erty Bridge, building his drift-wood fire 
under a great tin boiler, and making it 
lively for a lot of reluctant lobsters. 

I imagine that very little change has 
taken place in this immediate locality, known 
prosaically as Puddle Dock, during the past 
fifty or sixty years. The view you get look- 
ing across Liberty Bridge, Water Street, is 
probably the same in every respect that 
presented itself to the eyes of the town folk 



18 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

a century ago. The flagstaff, on the right, 
is the representative of the old "standard 
of liberty " which the Sons planted on this 
spot in January, 1766, signalizing their op- 
position to the enforcement of the Stamp 
Act. On the same occasion the patriots 
called at the house of Mr. George Meserve, 
the agent for distributing the stamps in 
New Hampshire, and relieved him of his 
stamp-master's commission, which document 
they carried on the point of a sword through 
the town to Liberty Bridge (then Swing 
Bridge), where they erected the staff, with 
the motto, "Liberty, Proj)erty, and no 
Stamp I " 

The Stamp Act was to go into operation 
on the first day of November. On the pre- 
vious morning the "New Hampshire Ga- 
zette " appeared with a deep black border 
and all the typographical emblems of afflic- 
tion, for was not Liberty dead? At all 
events, the " Gazette " itseK was as good as 
dead, since the printer could no longer 
publish it if he were to be handicapped 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 19 

by a heavy tax. " The day was ushered 
in by the tolling of all the bells in town, 
the vessels in the harbor had their col- 
ors hoisted half - mast high ; about three 
o'clock a funeral procession was formed, 
having a coffin with this inscription, Lib- 
EKTY, AGED 145, STAMPT. It moved from 
the state house, with two unbraced drums, 
through the principal streets. As it passed 
the Parade, minute-guns were fired ; at the 
place of interment a speech was delivered 
on the occasion, stating the many advantages 
we had received and the melancholy prospect 
before us, at the seeming departure of our 
invaluable liberties. But some signs of life 
appearing. Liberty was not deposited in the 
grave ; it was rescued by a number of her 
sons, the motto changed to Liberty revived, 
and carried off in triumph. The detestable 
Act was buried in its stead, and the clods 
of the valley were laid upon it ; the bells 
changed their melancholy sound to a more 
joyful tone." ^ 

1 Annals of Portsmouth, by Nathaniel Adams, 1825. 



20 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

With this side glance at one of the curious 
humors of the time, we resume our peregri- 
nations. 

Turning down a lane on your left, a few 
rods beyond Liberty Bridge, you reach a 
spot known as the Point of Graves, chiefly 
interesting as showing what a graveyard 
may come to if it last long enough. In 
1671 one Captain John Pickering, of whom 
we shall have more to say, ceded to the 
town a piece of ground on this neck for 
burial purposes. It is an odd-shaped lot, 
comprising about half an acre, inclosed 
by a crmnbling red brick wall two or 
three feet high, with wood capping. The 
place is overgrown with thistles, rank grass, 
and fungi ; the black slate headstones have 
mostly fallen over; those that still make a 
pretense of standing slant to every point of 
the compass, and look as if they were being 
blown this way and that by a mysterious 
gale which leaves everything else untouched ; 
the mounds have sunk to the common level, 
and the old undergTOund tombs have col- 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 21 

lapsed. Here and there among the moss and 
weeds you can pick out some name that 
shines in the history of the early settlement ; 
hundreds of the flower of the colony lie here, 
but the known and the unknown, gentle and 
simple, mingle their dust on a perfect equal- 
ity now. The marble that once bore a 
haughty coat of arms is as smooth as the 
hmnblest slate stone guiltless of heraldry. 
The lion and the unicorn, wherever they 
appear on some cracked slab, are very much 
tamed by time. The once fat-faced cherubs, 
with wing at either cheek, are the merest 
skeletons now. Pride, pomp, grief, and 
remembrance are all at end. No reverent 
feet come here, no tears fall here; the old 
graveyard itself is dead! A more dismal, 
uncanny spot than this at twilight would be 
hard to find. It is noticed that when the 
boys pass it after nightfall, they always go 
by whistling with a gayety that is perfectly 
hollow. 

Let us get into some cheerfuler neighbor- 
hood! 



m 

A STROLL ABOUT TOA\T^ 

As you leave the river front behind you, 
and pass " up town," the streets grow wider, 
and the architecture becomes more ambitious 
— streets fringed with beautiful old trees 
and lined with commodious private dwellings, 
mostly square white houses, with spacious 
halls running through the centre. Previous 
to the Revolution, white paint was seldom 
used on houses, and the diamond-shaped 
window pane was almost universal. Many 
of the residences stand back from the brick 
or flagstone sidewalk, and have pretty gar- 
dens at the side or in the rear, made bright 
with dahlias and sweet with cinnamon roses. 
If you chance to live in a town where the 
authorities cannot rest until they have de- 
stroyed every precious tree within their 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 23 

blighting reach, you will be especially 
charmed by the beauty of the streets of 
Portsmouth. In some parts of the town, 
when the chestnuts are in blossom, you 
would fancy yourself in a garden in fairy- 
land. In spring, summer, and autumn the 
foliage is the glory of the fair town — her 
luxuriant green and golden tresses! No- 
thing could seem more like the work of en- 
chantment than the spectacle which certain 
streets in Portsmouth present in midwinter 
after a heavy snowstorm. You may walk 
for miles under wonderful silvery arches 
formed by the overhanging and interlaced 
boughs of the trees, festooned with a drapery 
even more graceful and dazzling than spring- 
time gives them. The numerous elms and 
maples which shade the principal thorough- 
fares are not the result of chance, but the 
ample reward of the loving care that is 
taken to preserve the trees. There is a so- 
ciety in Portsmouth devoted to arboriculture. 
It is not unusual there for persons to leave 
legacies to be expended in setting out shade 



24 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

and ornamental trees along some favorite 
walk. Richards Avenue, a long, imbuilt 
thorougMare leading from Middle Street to 
the South Burying-Ground, perpetuates the 
name of a citizen who gave the labor of his 
own hands to the beautifying of that wind- 
swept and barren road to the cemetery. 
This fondness and care for trees seems to be 
a matter of heredity. So far back as 1660 
the selectmen instituted a fine of five shil- 
lings for the cutting of timber or any other 
wood from off the town common, excepting 
under special conditions. 

In the business section of the town trees 
are few\ The chief busmess streets are 
Congress and Market. Market Street is 
the stronghold of the dry -goods shops. 
There are seasons, I suppose, when these 
shops are crowded, but I have never hap- 
pened to be in Portsmouth at the time. I 
seldom pass through the narrow cobble^ 
paved street without wondering where the 
customers are that must keep all these flour- 
ishing little establishments going. CongTCSS 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 25 

Street — a more elegant thorouglifare than 
Market — is the Nevski Prospekt of Ports- 
mouth. Among the j)rominent buildmgs is 
the Athenseimi, containing a reading-room 
and library. From the high roof of this 
building the stroller will do well to take a 
glance at the surrounding country. He will 
naturally turn seaward for the more pic- 
turesque aspects. If the day is clear, he 
will see the famous Isles of Shoals, lying 
nine miles away — Appledore, Smutty-Nose, 
Star Island, White Island, etc. ; there are 
nine of them in all. On Appledore is 
Laighton's Hotel, and near it the smnmer 
cottage of Celia Thaxter, the poet of the 
Isles. On the northern end of Star Island 
is the quaint town of Gosport, with a tiny 
stone church perched like a sea-gull on its 
highest rock. A mile southwest from Star 
Island lies White Island, on which is a 
lighthouse. Mrs. Thaxter calls this the 
most picturesque of the group. Perilous 
neighbors, O mariner ! in any but the 
serenest weather, these wrinkled, scarred, 



26 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

and storm-smitten rocks, flanked by wicked 
sunken ledges that grow wkite at the lip 
with rage when the great winds blow ! 

How peaceful it all looks off there, on the 
smooth emerald sea ! and how softly the 
waves seem to break on yonder point where 
the unfinished fort is ! That is the ancient 
town of Newcastle, to reach which from 
Portsmouth you have to cross three bridges 
with the most enchanting scenery in New 
Hampshire lying on either hand. At New- 
castle the poet Stedman has built for his 
summerings an enviable little stone chateau 
— a seashell into which I fancy the sirens 
creep to warm themselves during the winter 
months. So it is never without its singer. 

Opposite Newcastle is Kittery Point, a 
romantic spot, where Sir William Pepperell, 
the first American baronet, once lived, and 
where liis tomb now is, in his orchard across 
the road, a few hmidred yards from the 
" goodly mansion " he built. The knight's 
tomb and the old Pepperell House, which 
has been somewhat curtailed of its fair pro- 



AN OLD TOWN BF THE SEA 27 

portions, are the objects of frequent pilgrim- 
ages to Kittery Point. 

From tliis elevation (the roof of the Athe- 
naeum) the navy yard, the river with its 
bridges and islands, the clustered gables of 
Kittery and Newcastle, and the illimitable 
ocean beyond make a picture worth climb- 
ing four or five flights of stairs to gaze upon. 
Glancing down on the town nestled in the 
foliage, it seems like a town dropped by 
chance in the midst of a forest. Among 
the prominent objects which lift themselves 
above the tree tops are the belfries of the 
various churches, the white faQade of the 
custom house, and the mansard and chim- 
neys of the Rockingham, the principal 
hotel. The pilgrim will be surprised to 
find in Portsmouth one of the most com- 
pletely appointed hotels in the United 
States. The antiquarian may lament the 
demolition of the old Bell Tavern, and 
think regretfully of the good cheer once 
furnished the wayfarer by Master Stavers 
at the sign of the Earl of Halifax, and by 



28 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

Master Stoodley at his inn on Daniel Street ; 
but tlie ordinary traveler will thank his 
stars, and confess that his lines have fallen 
in pleasant places, when he finds himself 
amono^ the frescoes of the Rockino^ham. 

Obliquely 023posite the doorstep of the 
Athenaeum — we are supposed to be on terra 
firma again — stands the Old North Church, 
a substantial wooden building, handsomely 
set on what is called The Parade, a large 
open space formed by the junction of Con- 
gress, Market, Daniel, and Pleasant streets. 
Here in days innocent of water-works stood 
the town pump, which on more than one oc- 
casion served as whipping-post. 

The churches of Portsmouth are more re- 
markable for their number than their archi- 
tecture. With the exception of the Stone 
Church they are constructed of wood or 
plain brick in the simplest style. St. John's 
Church is the only one likely to attract the 
eye of a stranger. It is finely situated on 
the crest of Church Hill, overlooking the 
ever-beautiful river. The present edifice was 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 29 

built in 1808 on the site of what was known 
as Queen's Chapel, erected in 1732, and 
destroyed by fire December 24, 1806. The 
chapel was named in honor of Queen Caro- 
line, who furnished the books for the altar 
and pulpit, the plate, and two solid mahog- 
any chairs, which are still in use in St. 
John's. Within the chancel rail is a curi- 
ous font of porphyry, taken by Colonel 
John Tufton Mason at the capture of Sene- 
gal from the French in 1758, and presented 
to the Episcopal Society in 1761. The 
peculiarly sweet-toned bell which calls the 
parishioners of St. John's together every 
Sabbath is, I believe, the same that formerly 
hung in the beKry of the old Queen's 
Chapel. If so, the bell has a history of its 
own. It was brought from Louisburg at the 
time of the reduction of that place in 1745, 
and given to the church by the officers of 
the New Hampshire troops. 

The Old South Meeting-House is not to be 
passed without mention. It is among the 
most aged survivals of pre-revolutionary days. 



30 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

Neither its architecture nor its age, however, 
is its chief warrant for our notice. The 
absurd number of windows in this battered 
old structure is what strikes the passer-by. 
The church was erected by subscription, 
and these closely set large windows are due 
to Henry Sherburne, one of the wealthiest 
citizens of the period, who agreed to pay 
for whatever glass was used. If the build- 
ing could have been composed entirely of 
glass it would have been done by the thrifty 
parishioners. 

Portsmouth is rich in graveyards — they 
seem to be a New England specialty — an- 
cient and modern. Among the old burial- 
places the one attached to St. John's Church 
is perhaps the most interesting. It has not 
been permitted to f aU into ruin, like the old 
cemetery at the Point of Graves. When 
a headstone here topples over it is kindly 
lifted up and set on its pins again, and en- 
couraged to do its duty. If it utterly re- 
fuses, and is not shamming decrepitude, it 
has its face sponged, and is allowed to rest 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 31 

and sun itself against the wall of the church 
with a row of other exempts. The trees are 
kept pruned, the grass trimmed, and here and 
there is a rosebush drooping with a weight 
of pensive pale roses, as becomes a rosebush 
in a churchyard. 

The place has about it an indescribable 
soothing atmosphere of respectability and 
comfort. Here rest the remains of the prin- 
cipal and loftiest in rank in their generation 
of the citizens of Portsmouth prior to the 
Kevolution — stanch, royalty-loving govern- 
ors, counselors, and secretaries of the Prov- 
ince of New Hampshire, all snugly gathered 
under the motherly wing of the Church of 
England. It is almost impossible to walk 
anywhere without stepping on a governor. 
You grow haughty in spirit after a while, 
and scorn to tread on anything less than 
one of His Majesty's colonels or a secretary 
under the Crown. Here are the tombs of 
the Atkinsons, the Jaffreys, the Sherburnes, 
the Sheafes, the Marshes, the Mannings, 
the Gardners, and others of the quality. 



32 ^iV" OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

All around you underfoot are tumbled-in 
coffins, with here and there a rusty sword 
atop, and faded escutcheons, and crumbling 
armorial devices. You are moving in the 
very best society. 

This, however, is not the earliest cemetery 
in Portsmouth. An hour's walk from the 
Episcopal yard will bring you to the spot, 
already mentioned, where the first house 
was built and the first grave made, at Odi- 
orne's Point. The exact site of the Manor is 
not known, but it is supposed to be a few 
rods north of an old well of still-flowing 
water, at which the Tomsons and the Hil- 
tons and their comrades slaked their thirst 
more than two hundred and sixty years ago. 
Odiorne's Point is owned by Mr. Eben L. 
Odiorne, a lineal descendant of the worthy 
who held the property in 1657. Not far 
from the old spring is the resting-place of 
the earliest pioneers. 

" This first cemetery of the white man in 
New Hampshire," writes Mr. Brewster, ^ 

^ Mr. Charles W. Brewster, for nearly fifty years the 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 33 

"occupies a space of perhaps one hundred 
feet by ninety, and is well walled in. The 
western side is now used as a burial-place 
for the family, but two thirds of it is filled 
with perhaps forty graves, indicated by 
rough head and foot stones. Who there 
rest no one now living knows. But the same 
care is taken of their quiet beds as if they 
were of the proprietor's own family. In 1631 
Mason sent over about eighty emigrants 
many of whom died in a few years, and here 
they were probably buried. Here too, 
doubtless, rest the remains of several of 
those whose names stand conspicuous in our 
early state records." 

editor of the Portsmouth Journal, and the author of two 
volumes of local sketches to which the writer of these 
pages here acknowledges his indebtedness. 



IV 

A STROLL ABOUT TOWN (continued) 

When Washington visited Portsmouth in 
1789 he was not much impressed by the 
architecture of the little town that had stood 
by him so stoutly in the struggle for inde- 
pendence. " There are some good houses," 
he writes, in a diary kept that year dui'ing 
a tour tlirough Connecticut, Massachusetts, 
and New Hampshire, " among which Colonel 
Langdon's may be esteemed the first; but 
in general they are indifferent, and almost 
entirely of wood. On wondering at this, as 
the country is full of stone and good clay 
for bricks, I was told that on account of 
the fogs and damp they deemed them whole- 
somer, and for that reason preferred wood 
buildings." 

The house of Colonel Langdon, on Pleas- 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 35 

ant Street, is an excellent sample of the solid 
and dignified abodes which our great-grand- 
sires had the sense to build. The art of 
their construction seems to have been a lost 
art these fifty years. Here Governor John 
Langdon resided from 1782 until the time of 
his death in 1819 — a period during which 
many an illustrious man passed between 
those two white pillars that support the little 
balcony over the front door ; among the rest 
Louis Philippe and his brothers, the Dues de 
Montpensier and Beaujolais, and the Marquis 
de Chastellux, a major-general in the French 
army, serving under the Count de Rocham- 
beau, whom he accompanied from France 
to the States in 1780. The journal of the 
marquis contains this reference to his host : 
"After dinner we went to drink tea with 
Mr. Langdon. He is a handsome man, and 
of noble carriage ; he has been a member of 
Congress, and is now one of the first people 
of the country; his house is elegant and 
well furnished, and the apartments admirably 
well wainscoted " (this reads like Mr. Sam- 



36 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

uel Pepys) ; " and lie has a good manuscript 
chart of the harbor of Portsmouth. Mrs. 
Langdon, his wife, is young, fair, and tol- 
erably handsome, but I conversed less with 
her than with her husband, in whose favor I 
was prejudiced from knowing that he had 
displayed great courage and patriotism at the 
time of Burgoyne's expedition." 

It was at the height of the French Rev- 
olution that the three sons of the Due 
d' Orleans were entertained at the Langdon 
mansion. Years afterward, when Louis 
Philippe was on the throne of France, he 
inquired of a Portsmouth lady presented at 
his court if the mansion of ce brave Gouver- 
neur Langdon was still in existence. 

The house stands back a decorous distance 
from the street, mider the shadows of some 
gigantic oaks or elms, and presents an im- 
posing appearance as you approach it over 
the tessellated marble walk. A hundred or 
two feet on either side of the gate, and abut- 
ting on the street, is a small square building 
of brick, one story in height — probably the 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 37 

porter's lodge and tool-house of former days. 
There is a large fruit garden attached to the 
house, which is in excellent condition, takino; 
life comfortably, and having the complacent 
air of a well-preserved beau of the ancien 
regime. The Langdon mansion was owned 
and long occupied by the late Rev. Dr. Bur- 
roughs, for a period of forty-seven years the 
esteemed rector of St. John's Church. 

At the other end of Pleasant Street is an- 
other notable house, to which we shall come 
by and by. Though President Washington 
found Portsmouth but moderately attractive 
from an architectural point of view, the vis- 
itor of to-day, if he have an antiquarian 
taste, will find himself embarrassed by the 
number of localities and buildings that ap- 
peal to his interest. Many of these build- 
ings were new and undoubtedly common- 
place enough at the date of Washington's 
visit ; time and association have given them 
a quaintness and a significance which now 
make their architecture a question of sec- 
ondary importance. 



38 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

One miglit spend a fortnight in Ports- 
mouth exploring the nooks and corners 
over which history has thrown a charm, 
and by no means exhaust the list. I can- 
not do more than attempt to describe — and 
that very briefly — a few of the typical old 
houses. On this same Pleasant Street there 
are several which we must leave mnioted, 
with their spacious halls and carven stair- 
cases, their antiquated furniture and old sil- 
ver tankards and choice Copleys. Nmnerous 
examples of this artist's best manner are to 
be found here. To live in Portsmouth with- 
out possessing a family portrait done by 
Copley is like living in Boston without 
having an ancestor in the old Granary 
Burying-Ground. You can exist, but you 
cannot be said to flourish. To make this 
statement smooth, I will remark that every 
one in Portsmouth has a Copley — or would 
have if a fair division were made. 

In the better sections of the town the 
houses are kept in such excellent repair, and 
have so smart an appearance with their 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 39 

bright green blinds and freshly painted 
woodwork, that you are likely to pass many 
an old landmark without suspecting it. 
Whenever you see a house with a gambrel 
roof, you may be almost positive that the 
house is at least a hundred years old, for 
the gambrel roof went out of fashion after 
the Revolution. 

On the corner of Daniel and Chapel 
streets stands the oldest brick building in 
Portsmouth — the Warner House. It was 
built in 1718 by Captain Archibald Mac- 
pheadris, a Scotchman, as his name indicates, 
a wealthy merchant, and a member of the 
King's Council. He was the chief projector 
of one of the earliest iron-works established 
in America. Captain Macpheadris married 
Sarah Wentworth, one of the sixteen chil- 
dren of Governor John Wentworth, and 
died in 1729, leaving a daughter, Mary, 
whose portrait, with that of her mother, 
painted by the ubiquitous Copley, still 
hangs in the parlor of this house, which is 
not known by the name of Captain Mac- 



40 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

pheadris, but by that of his son-in-law, Hon. 
Jonathan Warner, a member of the King's 
Council until the revolt of the colonies. 
" We well recollect Mr. Warner," says Mr. 
Brewster, writing in 1858, " as one of the 
last of the cocked hats. As in a vision of 
early childhood he is still before us, in all 
the dignity of the aristocratic crown officers. 
That broad-backed, long-skirted brown coat, 
those small-clothes and silk stockings, those 
silver buckles, and that cane — we see them 
still, although the life that filled and moved 
them ceased half a century ago." 

The Warner House, a three-story build- 
ing with gambrel roof and luthern windows, 
is as fine and substantial an exponent of the 
architecture of the period as you are likely 
to meet with anywhere in New England. 
The eighteen-inch walls are of brick brought 
from Holland, as were also many of the 
materials used in the building — the hearth- 
stones, tiles, etc. Hewn - stone underpin- 
nings were seldom adopted in those days; 
the brick-work rests directly upon the solid 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA_ 41 

walls of tlie cellar. The interior is rich in 
paneling and wood carvings about the 
mantel-shelves, the deep-set windows, and 
along the cornices. The halls are wide and 
long, after a by-gone fashion, with handsome 
staircases, set at an easy angle, and not 
standing nearly upright, like those ladders 
by which one reaches the upper chambers 
of a modern house. The principal rooms 
are paneled to the ceiling, and have large 
open chimney - places, adorned with the 
quaintest of Dutch tiles. In one of the par- 
lors of the Warner House there is a choice 
store of family relics — china, silver-plate, 
costumes, old clocks, and the like. There 
are some interesting paintings, too — not by 
Copley this time. On a broad space each 
side of the hall windows, at the head of the 
staircase, are pictures of two Indians, life 
size. They are probably portraits of some 
of the numerous chiefs with whom Captain 
Macj)headris had dealings, for the captain 
was engaged in the fur as well as in the 
iron business. Some enormous elk antlers, 



42 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

presented to Macpheadris by his red friends, 
are hanging in the lower hall. 

By mere chance, thirty or forty years ago, 
some long-hidden paintings on the walls of 
this lower hall were bronght to light. In 
repairing the front entry it became neces- 
sary to remove the paper, of which four or 
five layers had accumulated. At one place, 
where the several coats had peeled off cleanly, 
a horse's hoof was observed by a little girl 
of the family. The workman then began re- 
moving the paper carefully; first the legs, 
then the body of a horse with a rider were 
revealed, and the astonished paper-hanger 
presently stood before a life-size represen- 
tation of Governor Phipps on his charger. 
The workman called other persons to his as- 
sistance, and the remaining portions of the 
wall were speedily stripped, laying bare four 
or five hundred square feet covered with 
sketches in color, landscapes, views of un- 
known cities. Biblical scenes, and modern 
figure-pieces, among which was a lady at a 
spinning-wheel. Until then no person in 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 43 

the land of the living had had any know- 
ledge of those hidden pictures. An old dame 
of eighty, who had visited at the house 
intimately ever since her childhood, all but 
refused to believe her spectacles (though 
Supply Ham made them ^) when brought 
face to face with the frescoes. 

The place is rich in bricabrac, but there 
is nothing more curious than these incon- 
gruous paintings, clearly the work of a prac- 
ticed hand. Even the outside of the old 
edifice is not without its interest for an 
antiquarian. The lightning-rod which pro- 
tects the Warner House to-day was put up 
under Benjamin Franklin's own supervision 
in 1762 — such at all events is the credited 
tradition — and is supposed to be the first 
rod put up in New Hampshire. A light- 
ning-rod "personally conducted " by Benja- 
min Franklin ought to be an attractive ob- 
ject to even the least susceptible electricity. 
The Warner House has another imperative 

^ In the early part of this century, Supply Ham was 
the leading optician and watchmaker of Portsmouth. 



44 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

claim on tlie good-will of the visitor — it is 
not jDOsitively known tliat George Washing- 
ton ever slept there. 

The same assertion cannot safely be made 
in connection with the old yellow barracks 
situated on the southwest corner of Court 
and Atkinson streets. Famous old houses 
seem to have an intuitive perception of the 
value of corner lots. If it is a possible 
thing, they always set themselves down on 
the most desirable spots. It is beyond a 
doubt that Washington slept not only one 
night, but several nights, under this roof ; 
for this was a celebrated tavern previous 
and subsequent to the War of Independence, 
and Washington made it his headquarters 
during his visit to Portsmouth in 1797. 
When I was a boy I knew an old lady — 
not one of the preposterous old ladies in the 
newspapers, who have all their faculties un- 
im^jaired, but a real old lady, whose ninety- 
nine years were beginning to tell on her 
" — who had known Washington very well. 
She was a girl in her teens when he came to 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 45 

Portsmouth. The President was the staple 
of her conversation during the last ten years 
of her life, which she passed in the Stavers 
House, bedridden ; and I think those ten 
years were in a manner rendered short and 
pleasant to the old gentlewoman by the 
memory of a compliment to her complexion 
which Washington probably never paid to it. 

The old hotel — now a very unsavory tene- 
ment-house — was built by John Stavers, 
innkeeper, in 1770, who planted in front of 
the door a tall post, from which swung the 
sign of the Earl of Halifax. Stavers had 
previously kept an inn of the same name 
on Queen, now State Street. 

It is a square three-story building, shabby 
and dejected, giving no hint of the really 
important historical associations that cluster 
about it. At the time of its erection it was 
no doubt considered a rather gTand structure, 
for buildings of three stories were rare in 
Portsmouth. Even in 1798, of the six hun- 
dred and twenty-six dwelling houses of which 
the town boasted, eighty-six were of one 



46 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

story, five hundred and twenty-four were of 
two stories, and only sixteen of tkree stories. 
The Stavers inn has the regulation gambrel 
roof, but is lacking in those wood ornaments 
which are usually seen over the doors and 
windows of the more prominent houses of 
that epoch. It was, however, the hotel of 
the period. 

That same worn doorstep upon which 
Mr. O'Shaughnessy now stretches himself 
of a summer afternoon, with a short clay 
pipe stuck between his lips, and his hat 
crushed down on his brows, revolving the 
sad vicissitude of tilings — that same door- 
step has been pressed by the feet of gen- 
erals and marquises and grave dignitaries 
upon whom depended the destiny of the 
States — officers in gold lace and scarlet 
cloth, and high-heeled belles in patch, pow- 
der, and paduasoy. At this door the Fly- 
ing Stage Coach, which crept from Boston, 
once a week set down its load of passengers 
— and distinguished passengers they often 
were. Most of the chief celebrities of the 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 47 

land, before and after the secession of the 
colonies, were the guests of Master Stavers, 
at the sign of the Earl of Halifax. 

While the storm was brewing between 
the colonies and the mother country, it was 
in a back room of the tavern that the adher- 
ents of the crown met to discuss matters. 
The landlord himself was an amateur loy- 
alist, and when the full cloud was on the 
eve of breaking he had an early intimation 
of the coming tornado. The Sons of Lib- 
erty had long watched with sullen eyes the 
secret sessions of the Tories in Master Sta- 
vers's tavern, and one morning the patriots 
quietly began cutting down the post which 
supported the obnoxious emblem. Mr. 
Stavers, who seems not to have been belli- 
gerent himself, but the cause of belligerence 
in others, sent out his black slave with or- 
ders to stop proceedings. The negro, who was 
armed with an axe, struck but a single blow 
and disappeared. This blow fell upon the 
head of Mark Noble ; it did not kill him, 
but left him an insane man till the day of 



48 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

his death, forty years afterward. A furious 
mob at once collected, and made an attack 
on the tavern, bursting in the doors and 
shattering every pane of glass in the win- 
dows. It was only through the intervention 
of Captain John Langdon, a warm and pop- 
ular patriot, that the hotel was saved from 
destruction. 

In the mean while Master Stavers had es- 
caped through the stables in the rear. He 
fled to Stratham, where he was given refuge 
by his friend William Pottle, a most appro- 
priately named gentleman, who had supplied 
the hotel with ale. The excitement blew 
over after a time, and Stavers was induced 
to return to Portsmouth. He was seized 
by the Committee of Safety, and lodged in 
Exeter jail, when his loyalty, which had 
really never been very high, went down be- 
low zero ; he took the oath of allegiance, and 
shortly after his release reopened the hotel. 
The honest face of William Pitt appeared 
on the repentant sign, vice Earl of Halifax, 
ignominiously removed, and Stavers was 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 49 

himseK again. In the state records is tlie 
following letter from poor Noble begging for 
the enlargement of John Stavers : — 

Portsmouth, February 3, 1777. 
To the Committee of Safety of the Town of Exeter : 

Gentlemen, — As I am informed that Mr. 
Stivers is in confinement in gaol upon my account 
contrary to my desire, for when I was at Mr. Stivers 
a fast day I had no ill nor ment none against the 
Gentleman but by bad luck or misfortune I have 
received a bad Blow but it is so well that I hope to 
go out in a day or two. So by this gentlemen of the 
Committee I hope you will release the gentleman 
upon my account. I am yours to serve. 

Mark Noble, 
A friend to my country. 

From that period until I know not what 
year the Stavers House prospered. It was 
at the sign of the William Pitt that the offi- 
cers of the French fleet boarded in 1782, and 
hither came the Marquis Lafayette, all the 
way from Providence, to visit them. John 
Hancock, Elbridge Gerry, Rutledge, and 
other signers of the Declaration sojourned 
here at various times. It was here General 



60 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

Kjiox — " that stalwart man, two officers in 
size and three in lungs " — was wont to 
order his dinner, and in a stentorian voice 
compliment Master Stavers on the excellence 
of his larder. One day — it was at the time 
of the French Kevolution — Louis Philippe 
and his two brothers aj)plied at the door 
of the William Pitt for lodgings ; but the 
tavern was full, and the future king, with 
his companions, found comfortable quarters 
under the hospitable roof of Governor Lang- 
don in Pleasant Street. 

A record of the scenes, tragic and humor- 
ous, that have been enacted within this old 
yellow house on the corner would fill a vol- 
ume. A vivid picture of the social and pub- 
lic life of the old time might be painted by a 
skiUfid hand, using the two Earl of Halifax 
inns for a background. The painter would 
find gay and sombre pigments ready mixed 
for his palette, and a hundred romantic in- 
cidents waiting for his canvas. One of these 
romantic episodes has been turned to very 
pretty account by Longfellow in the last 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 51 

series of The Tales of a Wayside Inn — the 
marriage of Governor Benning Wentworth 
with Martha Hilton, a sort of second edition 
of King Co23hetua and the Beggar Maid. 

Martha Hilton was a poor girl, whose bare 
feet and ankles and scant drapery when she 
was a child, and even after she was well in 
the bloom of her teens, used to scandalize 
good Dame Stavers, the innkeeper's wife. 
Standing one afternoon in the doorway of 
the Earl of Halifax,^ Dame Stavers took oc- 
casion to remonstrate with the sleek-limbed 
and lightly draped Martha, who chanced 
to be passing the tavern, carrying a pail 
of water, in which, as the poet neatly says, 
" the shifting sunbeam danced." 

1 The first of the two hotels bearing that title. Mr. 
Brewster commits a slight anachronism in locating the 
scene of this incident in Jaffrey Street, now Court. The 
Stavers House was not built until the year of Governor 
Benning Wentworth's death. Mr. Longfellow, in the 
poem, does not fall into the same error. 

" One hundred years ago, and something more, 
In Queen Street, Portsmouth, at her tavern door. 
Neat as a pin, and blooming as a rose, 
Stood Mistress Stavers in her furbelows." 



52 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

" You Pat ! you Pat ! " cried Mrs. Stavers 
severely ; " why do you go looking so ? You 
should be ashamed to be seen in the street." 

"Never mind how I look," says Miss 
Martha, with a merry laugh, letting slip a 
saucy brown shoulder out of her dress ; " I 
shall ride in my chariot yet, ma'am." 

Fortunate prophecy ! Martha went to live 
as servant with Governor Wentworth at his 
mansion at Little Harbor, looking out to 
sea. Seven years passed, and the " thin slip 
of a girl," who promised to be no great 
beauty, had flowered into the loveliest of 
women, with a lip like a cherry and a cheek 
like a tea-rose — a lady by instinct, one of 
Nature's own ladies. The governor, a lonely 
widower, and not too young, fell in love with 
his fair handmaid. Without stating his pur- 
pose to any one. Governor Wentworth in- 
vited a number of friends (among others the 
Rev. Arthur Brown) to dine with him at 
Little Harbor on his birthday. After the 
dinner, which was a very elaborate one, was 
at an end, and the guests were discussing 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 53 

their tobacco-pipes, Martha Hilton glided 
into the room, and stood blushing in front 
of the chimney-place. She was exquisitely 
dressed, as you may conceive, and wore her 
hair three stories high. The guests stared 
at each other, and particularly at her, and 
wondered. Then the governor, rising from 
his seat, 

"Played slightly with his ruffles, then looked down, 
And said unto the Reverend Arthur Brown : 
* This is my birthday ; it shall likewise he 
My wedding-day ; and you shall marry me ! ' " 

The rector was dumfounded, knowing the 
humble footing Martha had held in the 
house, and could think of nothing cleverer 
to say than, " To whom, your excellency ? " 
which was not clever at all. 

" To this lady," rej)lied the governor, tak- 
ing Martha Hilton by the hand. The Rev. 
Arthur Brown hesitated. "As the Chief 
Magistrate of New Hampshire I command 
you to marry me ! " cried the choleric old 
governor. 

And so it was done; and the pretty 



54 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

kitchen-maid became Lady Wentworth, and 
did ride in her own chariot. She would not 
have been a woman if she had not taken 
an early opportunity to drive by Stavers's 
hotel ! 

Lady Wentworth had a keen appreciation 
of the dignity of her new station, and be- 
came a grand lady at once. A few days 
after her marriage, dropping her ring on the 
floor, she languidly ordered her servant to 
pick it up. The servant, who appears to 
have had a fair sense of humor, grew sud- 
denly near-sighted, and was unable to find 
the ring until Lady Wentworth stooped and 
placed her ladyship's finger upon it. She 
turned out a faultless wife, however; and 
Governor Wentworth at his death, which 
occurred in 1770, signified his approval of 
her by leaving her his entire estate. She 
married again without changing name, ac- 
cepting the hand, and what there was of the 
heart, of Michael Wentworth, a retired colo- 
nel of the British army, who came to this 
country in 1767. Colonel Wentworth (not 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA ^^ 

connected, I think, with the Portsmouth 
branch of Wentworths) seems to have been 
of a convivial turn of mind. He shortly 
dissipated his wife's fortune in high living, 
and died abruptly in New York — it was sup- 
posed by his own hand. His last words — 
a quite unique contribution to the literature 
of last words — were, " I have had my cake, 
and ate it," which show that the colonel 
within his own modest limitations was a 
philosopher. 

The seat of Governor Wentworth at Lit- 
tle Harbor — a pleasant walk from Market 
Square — is well worth a visit. Time and 
change have laid their hands more lightly 
on this rambling old pile than on any other 
of the old homes in Portsmouth. When 
you cross the threshold of the door you step 
into the colonial period. Here the Past 
seems to have halted courteously, waiting 
for you to catch up with it. Inside and out- 
side the Wentworth mansion remains nearly 
as the old governor left it ; and though it is 
no longer in the possession of the family, 



66 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

the present owners, in their willingness to 
gratify the decent curiosity of strangers, 
show a hospitality which has always charac- 
terized the place. 

The house is an architectural freak. The 
main building — if it is the main building — 
is generally two stories in height, with irreg- 
ular wings forming three sides of a square 
which opens on the water. It is, in brief, a 
cluster of whimsical extensions that look as 
if they had been built at different periods, 
which I believe was not the case. The 
mansion was completed in 1750. It ori- 
ginally contained fifty-two rooms ; a portion 
of the structure was removed about half a 
century ago, leaving forty-five apartments. 
The chambers were connected in the odd- 
est manner, by unexpected steps leading 
up or down, and capricious little passages 
that seem to have been the vmhappy after- 
thoughts of the architect. But it is a man- 
sion on a grand scale, and with a gTand air. 
The cellar was arranged for the stabling of 
a troop of thirty horse in times of danger. 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 57 

The council-chamber, where for many years 
all questions of vital importance to the State 
were discussed, is a spacious, high-studded 
room, finished in the richest style of the last 
century. It is said that the ornamentation 
of the huge mantel, carved with knife and 
chisel, cost the workman a year's constant 
labor. At the entrance to the council- 
chamber are still the racks for the twelve 
muskets of the governor's guard — so long- 
ago dismissed ! 

Some valuable family portraits adorn the 
walls here, among which is a fine painting — 
yes, by our friend Copley — of the lovely 
Dorothy Quincy, who married John Han- 
cock, and afterward became Madam Scott. 
This lady was a niece of Dr. Holmes's " Dor- 
othy Q." Opening on the coimcil-chamber 
is a large billiard-room ; the billiard-table is 
gone, but an ancient sj^innet, with the prim air 
of an ancient maiden lady, and of a wheezy 
voice, is there ; and in one corner stands 
a claw-footed buffet, near which the imagi- 
native nostril may still detect a faint and 



68 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

tantalizing odor of colonial punch. Open- 
ing also on the coimcil-chamber are several 
tiny apartments, empty and silent now, in 
wliich many a close rubber has been played 
by illustrious hands. The stillness and lone- 
liness of the old house seem saddest here. 
The jeweled fingers are dust, the merry 
laughs have turned themselves into silent, 
sorrowful phantoms, stealing from chamber 
to chamber. It is easy to believe in the 
traditional ghost that haunts the place — 

" A jolly place in times of old, 
But something ails it now ! " 

The mansion at Little Harbor is not the 
only historic house that bears the name of 
Wentworth. On Pleasant Street, at the 
head of Washington Street, stands the abode 
of another colonial worthy, Governor John 
Wentworth, who held office from 1767 down 
to the moment when the colonies dropped 
the British yoke as if it had been the letter 
H. For the moment the good gentleman's 
occupation was gone. He was a royalist of 
the most florid complexion. In 1775, a man 



^l^Y OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 59 

named Jokn Fenton, an ex-captain in the 
British army, who had managed to offend 
the Sons of Liberty, was given sanctuary in 
this house by the governor, who refused to 
deliver the fugitive to the people. The mob 
planted a small cannon (unloaded) in front 
of the doorstep and threatened to open fire 
if Fenton were not forthcoming. He forth- 
with came. The family vacated the prem- 
ises via the back-yard, and the mob entered, 
doing considerable damage. The broken 
marble chimney-piece still remains, mutely 
protesting against the uncalled-for violence. 
Shortly after this event the governor made 
his way to England, where his loyalty was 
rewarded first with a governorship and then 
with a pension of £500. He was governor 
of Xova Scotia from 1792 to 1800, and died 
in Halifax in 1820. This house is one of 
the handsomest old dwellings in the town, 
and promises to outlive many of its newest 
neighbors. The parlor has undergone no 
change whatever since the populace rushed 
into it over a century ago. The furniture 



60 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

and adornments occupy their original posi- 
tions, and the plush on the walls has not 
been rej)laced by other hangings. In the 
hall — deep enough for the traditional duel 
of baronial romance — are full-length por- 
traits of the several governors and sundry 
of their kinsfolk. 

There is yet a third Wentworth house, 
also decorated with the shade of a colonial 
governor — there were three Governors 
Wentworth — but we shall pass it by, 
though out of no lack of respect for that 
high official personage whose commission 
was signed by Joseph Addison, Esq., Sec- 
retary of State under George I. 



OLD STRAWBERRY BANK 

These old houses have perhaps detained 
us too long. They are merely the criunbling 
sheUs of things dead and gone, of persons 
and manners and customs that have left no 
very distinct record of themselves, excepting 
here and there in some sallow manuscript 
which has luckily escaped the withering 
breath of fire, for the old town, as I have 
remarked, has managed, from the earliest 
moment of its existence, to burn itself up 
periodically. It is only through the scat- 
tered memoranda of ancient town clerks, and 
in the files of worm-eaten and forgotten 
newspapers, that we are enabled to get 
glimpses of that life which was once so real 
and positive and has now become a shadow. 
I am of course speaking of the early days of 



62 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

the settlement on Strawberry Bank. Tliey 
were stormy and eventful clays. The dense 
forest which surrounded the clearing was 
alive with hostile red-men. The sturdy pil- 
grim went to sleep with his firelock at his bed- 
side, not knowing at what moment he might 
be awakened by the glare of his burning hay- 
ricks and the piercing war-whoop of the 
Womponoags. Year after year he saw his 
harvest reaped by a sickle of flame, as he 
peered through the loop-holes of the block- 
house, whither he had flown in hot haste with 
goodwife and little ones. The blockhouse 
at Strawberry Bank appears to have been 
on an extensive scale, with stockades for the 
shelter of cattle. It held large supplies of 
stores, and was amply furnished with arque- 
buses, sakers, and murtherers, a species of 
naval ordnance which probably did not belie 
its name. It also boasted, we are told, of 
two driuns for training-days, and no fewer 
than fifteen hautboys and soft-voiced re- 
corders — all which suggests a mediaeval 
castle, or a gi'im fortress in the time of 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 63 

Queen Elizabetli. To the younger members 
of the connnunity glass or crockery ware 
was an unknown substance ; to the eklers it 
was a memory. An iron pot was the pot- 
of-aU-work, and their table utensils were 
of beaten pewter. The diet was also of the 
simplest — pea-porridge and corn-cake, with 
a mug of ale or a flagon of Spanish wine, 
when they could get it. 

John Mason, who never resided in this 
country, but delegated the management of 
his plantation at Piscataqua and Newiche- 
wannock to stewards, died before realizing 
any appreciable return from his enterprise. 
He spared no endeavor meanwhile to fur- 
ther its prosperity. In 1632, three years 
before his death, Mason sent over from 
Denmark a number of neat cattle, "of a 
large breed and yellow colour." The herd 
thrived, and it is said that some of the stock 
is still extant on farms in the vicinity of 
Portsmouth. Those old first families had 
a kind of staying quality ! 

In May, 1653, the inhabitants of the 



64 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

settlement petitioned tlie General Court at 
Boston to grant them a definite townsliip — 
for tlie boundaries were doubtful — and the 
right to give it a j)roper name. " Whereas 
the name of this plantation att present be- 
ing Strabery Banke, accidentally soe called, 
by reason of a banke where straberries was 
found in this place, now we humbly desire 
to have it called Portsmouth^ being a name 
most suitable for this place, it being the 
river's mouth, and good as any in this land, 
and your petit'rs shall humbly pray," etc. 

Throughout that formative period, and 
during the intermittent French wars, Ports- 
mouth and the outlying districts were the 
scenes of many bloody Indian massacres. 
No portion of the New England colony suf- 
fered more. Famine, fire, pestilence, and 
war, each in its turn, and sometimes in con- 
junction, beleaguered the little stronghold, 
and threatened to wipe it out. But that 
was not to be. 

The settlement flourished and increased 
in spite of all, and as soon as it had leisure 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 65 

to draw breath, it bethouglit itself of the 
school-house and the jail — two incontestable 
signs of budding civilization. At a town 
meeting in 1662, it was ordered " that a cage 
be made or some other meanes invented by 
the selectmen to punish such as sleepe or 
take tobacco on the Lord's day out of the 
meetinge in the time of publique service." 
This salutary measure was not, for some 
reason, carried into effect until nine years 
later, when Captain John Pickering, who 
seems to have had as many professions as 
Michelangelo, undertook to construct a cage 
twelve feet square and seven feet high, with 
a pillory on top ; " the said Pickering to 
make a good strong dore and make a sub- 
stantiale payre of stocks and place the same 
in said cage." A spot conveniently near 
the west end of the meeting-house was se- 
lected as the site for this ingenious device. 
It is more than probable that "the said 
Pickering" indirectly furnished an occa- 
sional bird for his cage, for in 1672 we find 
him and one Edward Westwere authorized 



66 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

by the selectmen to " keepe houses of pub- 
lique entertainment." He was a versatile 
individual, this John Pickering — soldier, 
miller, moderator, carpenter, lawyer, and 
innkeeper. Michelangelo need not blush 
to be bracketed with him. In the course of 
a long and variegated career he never failed 
to act according to his lights, which he 
always kept well trimmed. That Captain 
Pickering subsequently became the grand- 
father, at several removes, of the present 
writer was no fault of the Captain's, and 
should not be laid up against him. 

Down to 1696, the education of the young 
appears to have been a rather desultory and 
tentative matter ; " the young idea " seems 
to have been allowed to "shoot" at what- 
ever it wanted to ; but in that year it was 
voted "that care be taken that an abell 
scollmaster [skulhnaster !] be provided for 
the towen as the law directs, not visions in 
conversation.'''' That was perhaps demand- 
ing too much ; for it was not until " May ye 
7 " of the following year that the selectmen 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 67 

were fortunate enough to put their finger on 
this rara avis in the person' of Mr. Tho. 
Phippes, who agreed " to be scoUmaster for 
the towen this yr insewing for teaching the 
inhabitants children in such manner as other 
schoUmasters yously doe throughout the 
countrie : for his soe doinge we the sellectt 
men in behalfe of ower towen doe ingage to 
pay him by way of rate twenty pounds and 
yt he shall and may reserve from every 
father or master that sends theyer children 
to school this yeare after ye rate of 16 s. for 
readers, writers and cypherers 20 s., Lattin- 
ers 24 s." 

Modern advocates of phonetic spelling 
need not plume themselves on their origi- 
nality. The town clerk who wrote that de- 
licious " yously doe " settles the question. 
It is to be hoped that Mr. Tho. Phippes 
was not only "not visions in conversation," 
but was more conventional in his orthog- 
raphy. He evidently gave satisfaction, and 
clearly exerted an influence on the town 
clerk, Mr. Samuel Keais, who ever after 



68 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

shows a marked improvement in his own 
methods. In 1704 the town empowered the 
selectmen " to call and settell a gramer scoll 
according to ye best of yower judgment and 
for ye advantag [Keais is obviously dead 
now] of ye youth of ower town to learn 
them to read from ye primer, to wright and 
sypher and to learne ym the tongues and 
good-manners." On this occasion it was 
Mr. William Allen, of Salisbmy, who en- 
gaged "dilligently to attend ye school for 
ye present yeare, and tech all children yt 
can read in thaire psallters and upward." 
From such humble beginnings were evolved 
some of the best public high schools at pres- 
ent in New England. 

Portsmouth did not escape the witchcraft 
delusion, though I believe that no hangings 
took place within the boundaries of the 
township. Dwellers by the sea are generally 
superstitious ; sailors always are. There is 
something in the illimitable expanse of sky 
and water that dilates the imagination. 
The folk who live along the coast live on 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 69 

the edge of a perpetual mystery; only a 
strip of yellow sand or gray rock separates 
tliem from the miknown ; they hear strange 
voices in the winds at midnight, they are 
haunted by the spectres of the mirage. 
Their minds quickly take the impress of un- 
canny things. The witches therefore found 
a sympathetic atmosphere in Newcastle, at 
the mouth of the Piscataqua — that slender 
paw of land which reaches out into the ocean 
and terminates in a spread of sharp, flat 
rocks, like the claws of an amorous cat. 
AYhat happened to the good folk of that 
picturesque little fishing-hamlet is worth re- 
telling in brief. In order properly to retell 
it, a contemporary witness shall be called 
upon to testify in the case of the Stone- 
Throwing Devils of Newcastle. It is the 
Rev. Cotton Mather who addresses you — 

'* On June 11, 1682, showers of stones 
were thrown by an invisible hand upon the 
house of George Walton at Portsmouth 
[Newcastle was then a part of the town]. 
Whereupon the people going out found the 



70 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

gate wrung off the hinges, and stones flying 
and falling thick about them, and striking 
of them seemingly with a great force^ but 
really affecting 'em no more than if a soft 
touch were given them. The glass windows 
were broken by stones that came not from 
without, but from within ; and other instru- 
ments were in a like manner hurled about. 
Nine of the stones they took up, whereof 
some were as hot as if they came out of the 
fire; and marking them they laid them on 
the table ; but in a little while they found 
some of them again flying about. The spit 
was carried up the chimney, and coming 
down with the point forward, stuck in the 
back log, from whence one of the company 
removing it, it was by an invisible hand 
thrown out at the window. This disturb- 
ance continued from day to day ; and some- 
times a dismal hollow ichistlmg would be 
heard, and sometimes the trotting and 
snorting of a horse, but nothing to be seen. 
The man went up the Great Bay in a boat 
on to a farm which he had there ; but there 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 71 

the stones found him out, and carrying 
from the house to the boat a stirrup won 
the iron came jingling after him through 
the woods as far as his house ; and at last 
went away and was heard no more. The 
anchor leaped overboard several times and 
stopt the boat. A cheese was taken out of 
the press, and crumbled all over the floor; 
a piece of iron stuck into the wall, and a 
kettle hung thereon. Several cocks of hay, 
mow'd near the house, were taken up and 
hung upon the trees, and others made into 
small whisps, and scattered about the house. 
A man was much hurt by some of the stones. 
He was a Quaker, and suspected that a 
woman, who charged him with injustice in 
detaining some land from her, did, by witch- 
crafty occasion these preternatural occur- 
rences. However, at last they came to an 
end." 

Now I have done with thee, O credulous 
and sour Cotton Mather ! so get thee back 
again to thy tomb in the old burying-ground 
on Copp's Hill, where, unless thy nature is 



72 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

radically clianged, thou makest it uncom- 
fortable for those about thee. 

Nearly a hundred years afterward, Ports- 
mouth had another witch — a tangible witch 
in this instance — one Molly Bridget, who 
cast her malign spell on the eleemosynary 
pigs at the Almshouse, where she chanced 
to reside at the moment. The pigs were 
manifestly be^^tched, and Mr. Clement 
March, the superintendent of the institution, 
saw only one remedy at hand, and that was 
to cut off and burn the tips of their tails. 
But when the tips were cut off they disap- 
peared, and it was in consequence quite im- 
practicable to burn them. Mr. March, who 
was a gentleman of expedients, ordered that 
all the chips and underbrush in the yard 
should be made into heaps and consumed, 
hoping thus to catch and do away with the 
mysterious and provoking extremities. The 
fires were no sooner lighted than Molly 
Bridget rushed from room to room in a state 
of frenzy. With the dying flames her own 
vitality subsided, and she was dead before 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 73 

the ash-piles were cool. I say it seriously 
when I say that these are facts of which 
there is authentic proof. 

If the woman had recovered, she would 
have fared badly, even at that late period, 
had she been in Salem ; but the death-pen- 
alty has never been hastily inflicted in 
Portsmouth. The first execution that ever 
took place there was that of Sarah Simpson 
and Penelope Kenny, for the murder of an 
infant in 1739. The sherife was Thomas 
Packer, the same official who, twenty-nine 
years later, won unenviable notoriety at the 
hanging of Ruth Blay. The circumstances 
are set forth by the late Albert Laighton in 
a spirited ballad, which is too long to quote 
in full. The following stanzas, however, 
give the pith of the story — 

" And a voice among them shouted, 
' Pause before the deed is done ; 
We have asked reprieve and pardon 
For the poor misguided one.' 

** But these words of Sheriff Packer 
Rang above the swelling noise : 



74 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

* Must I wait and lose my dinner ? 
Draw away the cart, my boys ! ' 

" Nearer came tlie sound and louder, 
Till a steed with panting breath. 
From its sides the white foam dripping, 
Halted at the scene of death ; 

" And a messenger alighted, 

Crying to the crowd, ' Make way ! 
This I bear to Sheriff Packer ; 
'T is a pardon for Ruth Blay ! ' " 

But of course he arrived too late — tlie 
Law led Mercy about twenty minutes. The 
crowd dispersed, horror-stricken ; hut it as- 
sembled again that night before the sheriff's 
domicile and expressed its indignation in 
groans. His effigy, hanged on a miniature 
gallows, was afterward paraded through the 
streets. 

" Be the name of Thomas Packer 
A reproach forevermore ! " 

Laighton's ballad reminds me that Ports- 
mouth has been prolific in poets, one of 
whom, at least, has left a mouthful of peren- 
nial rhjnne for orators — Jonathan SeweU 
with his 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 75 

" No pent-up Utica contracts your powers, 
But the whole boundless continent is yours." 

I have somewhere seen a volume with the 
alliterative title of " Poets of Portsmouth," 
in which are embalmed no fewer than sixty- 
immortals ! 

But to drop into prose again, and have 
done with this iliad of odds and ends. 
Portsmouth has the honor, I believe, of 
establishing the first recorded pauper work- 
house — though not in connection with her 
poets, as might naturally be supposed. The 
building was completed and tenanted in 
1716. Seven years later, an act was passed 
in England authorizing the establishment of 
parish workhouses there. The first and only 
keeper of the Portsmouth ahnshouse up to 
1750 was a woman — Kebecca Austin. 

Speaking of first things, we are told by 
Mr. Nathaniel Adams, in his "Annals of 
Portsmouth," that on the 20th of April, 
1761, Mr. John Stavers began running a 
stage from that town to Boston. The car- 
riage was a two-horse curricle, wide enough 



76 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

to accommodate three passengers. The fare 
was thirteen shillings and sixpence sterling 
per head. The curricle was presently super- 
seded by a series of fat yellow coaches, one 
of which — nearly a century later, and long 
after that pleasant mode of travel had fallen 
obsolete — was the cause of much mental 
tribulation ^ to the writer of this chronicle. 
The mail and the newspaper are closely 
associated factors in civilization, so I men- 
tion them together, though in this case the 
newspaper antedated the mail-coach about 
five years. On October 7, 1756, the first 
number of "The New Hampshire Gazette 
and Historical Chronicle " was issued in 
Portsmouth from the press of Daniel Fowle, 
who in the previous July had removed from 
Boston, where he had undergone a brief but 
uncongenial imprisonment on suspicion of 
having printed a pamplilet entitled "The 
Monster of Monsters, by Tom Thumb, 

^ Some idle reader here and there may possibly recall 
the burning of the old stage-coach in The Story of a Bad 
Boy. 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 11 

Esq.," an essay that contained some uncom- 
plimentary reflections on several official per- 
sonages. The " Gazette " was the pioneer 
journal of the province. It was followed at 
the close of the same year by " The Mer- 
cury and Weekly Advertiser," published by 
a former apprentice of Fowle, a certain 
Thomas Furber, backed by a number of 
restless Whigs, who considered the " Ga- 
zette" not sufficiently outspoken in the 
cause of liberty. Mr. Fowle, however, con- 
trived to hold his own until the day of his 
death. Fowle had for pressman a faithful 
negro named Primus, a fidl-blooded African. 
Whether Primus was a freeman or a slave 
I am unable to state. He lived to a great 
age, and was a prominent figure among the 
people of his own color. 

Negro slavery was common in New Eng- 
land at that period. In 1767, Portsmouth 
numbered in its population a hundred and 
eighty-eight slaves, male and female. Their 
bondage, happily, was nearly always of a 
light sort, if any bondage can be light. 



78 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

They were allowed to have a kind of gov- 
ernment of their own; indeed, were en- 
couraged to do so, and no unreasonable 
restrictions were placed on their social enjoy- 
ment. They annually elected a king and 
counselors, and celebrated the event with a 
procession. The aristocratic feeling was 
highly developed in them. The rank of the 
master was the slave's rank. There was a 
great deal of ebony standing around on its 
dignity in those days. For example. Gov- 
ernor Langdon's manservant, Cyrus Bruce, 
was a person who insisted on his distinction, 
and it was recognized. His massive gold 
chain and seals, his cherry-colored small- 
clothes and silk stockings, his ruffles and 
silver shoe-buckles, were a tradition long- 
after Cyrus himseK was pulverized. 

In cases of minor misdemeanor among 
them, the negroes themselves were permitted 
to be judge and jury. Their administration 
of justice was often characteristically naive. 
Mr. Brewster gives an amusing sketch of one 
of their sessions. King Nero is on the bench. 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 79 

and one Cato — we are nothing if not clas- 
sical — is tlie prosecuting attorney. The 
name of the prisoner and the nature of his 
offense are not disclosed to posterity. In 
the midst of the proceedings the hour of noon 
is clanged from the neighboring belfry of the 
Old North Church. " The evidence was not 
gone through with, but the servants could 
stay no longer from their home duties. 
They all wanted to see the whipping, but 
could not conveniently be present again 
after dinner. Cato ventured to address the 
King: Please your Honor ^hest let the fel- 
low have his whipping noiv, and finish the 
trial after dinner. The request seemed to 
be the general wish of the company: so 
Nero ordered ten lashes, for justice so far 
as the trial went, and ten more at the close 
of the trial, should he be found guilty ! " 

Slavery in New Hampshire was never 
legally abolished, unless Abraham Lincoln 
did it. The State itself has not ever pro- 
nounced any emancipation edict. During 
the Revolutionary War the slaves were 



80 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

gradually emancipated by their masters. 
That many of the negroes, who had grown 
gray in service, refused their freedom, and 
elected to spend the rest of their lives as 
pensioners in the families of their late own- 
ers, is a circumstance that illustrates the 
kindly ties which held between slave and 
master in the old colonial days in New 
England. 

The institution was accidental and super- 
ficial, and never had any real root in the 
Granite State. If the Puritans could have 
found in the Scriptures any direct sanction 
of slavery, perhaps it would have continued 
awhile longer, for the Puritan carried his 
religion into the business affairs of life ; 
he was not even able to keep it out of his 
bills of lading. I cannot close this ram- 
bling chapter more appropriately and sol- 
emnly than by quoting from one of those 
same pious bills of lading. It is dated Jime, 
1726, and reads : " Shipped by the grace 
of God in good order and well conditioned, 
by Wm. Pepperills on there own acct. and 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 81 

risque, in and upon tlie good Briga called 
tlie William, whereof is master under God 
for this present voyage George King, now 
riding at anchor in the river Piscataqua and 
by God's grace bound to Barbadoes." Here 
follows a catalogue of the miscellaneous 
cargo, rounded off with : " And so God send 
the good Briga to her desired port in safety. 
Amen." 



VI 

SOME OLD PORTSMOUTH PROFILES 

I DOUBT if any New England town ever 
turned out so many eccentric characters as 
Portsmouth. From 1640 down to about 
1848 there must have been something in the 
air of the place that generated eccentricity. 
In another chapter I shall explain why the 
conditions have not been favorable to the 
development of individual singularity during 
the latter half of the present century. It is 
easier to do that than fully to account for 
the numerous queer human types which have 
existed from time to time previous to that 
period. 

In recently turning over the pages of Mr. 
Brewster's entertaining collection of Ports- 
mouth sketches, I have been struck by the 
nmnber and variety of the odd men and 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 83 

women who appear incidentally on the scene. 
They are, in the author's intention, secondary 
figures in the background of his landscape, 
but they stand very much in the foreground 
of one's memory after the book is laid aside. 
One finds one's self thinking quite as often 
of that squalid old hut-dweller up by Saga- 
more Creek as of General Wasliington, who 
visited the town in 1789. Conservatism and 
respectability have their values, certainly; 
but has not the unconventional its values 
also? If we render unto that old hut- 
dweller the things which are that old hut- 
dweller's, we must concede him his pictur- 
esqueness. He was dirty, and he was not 
respectable; but he is picturesque — now 
that he is dead. 

If the reader has five or ten minutes to 
waste, I invite him to glance at a few old 
profiles of persons who, however substantial 
they once were, are now leading a life of 
mere outlines. I would like to give them a 
less faded expression, but the past is very 
chary of yielding up anything more than its 
shadows. 



84 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

The first wlio presents himself is the rumi- 
native hermit akeady mentioned — a species 
of uninspired Thoreau. His name was 
Benjamin Lear. So far as his craziness 
went, he might have been a lineal descendant 
of that ancient king of Britain who figures 
on Shakespeare's page. Family dissensions 
made a recluse of King Lear; but in the 
case of Benjamin there were no mitigating 
circumstances. He had no family to trouble 
him, and his realm remained imdivided. 
He owned an excellent farm on the south 
side of Sagamore Creek, a little to the west 
of the bridge, and might have lived at ease, 
if personal comfort had not been distasteful 
to hun. Personal comfort entered into no 
plan of Lear's. To be alone filled the little 
pint-measm^e of his desire. He ensconced 
himself in a wretched shanty, and barred 
the door, figuratively, against all the world. 
Wealth — what would have been wealth to 
hun — lay within his reach, but he thrust 
it aside ; he disdained luxury as he disdained 
idleness, and made no compromise with con- 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 85 

vention. Wlien a man cuts himself abso- 
lutely adrift from custom, what an astonish- 
ingly light spar floats hun ! How few his 
wants are, after all! Lear was of a cheer- 
ful disposition, and seems to have been 
wholly inoffensive — at a distance. He fab- 
ricated his own clothes, and subsisted chiefly 
on milk and potatoes, the product of his 
reahn. He needed nothing but an island to 
be a Robinson Crusoe. At rare intervals he 
flitted like a frost-bitten apparition through 
the main street of Portsmouth, which he 
always designated as "the Bank," a name 
that had become obsolete fifty or a hundred 
years before. Thus, for nearly a quarter of 
a century, Benjamin Lear stood aloof from 
human intercourse. In his old age some 
of the neighbors offered him shelter during 
the tempestuous winter months; but he 
woidd have none of it — he defied wind and 
weather. There he lay in his dilapidated 
hovel in his last illness, refusing to allow 
any one to remain with him overnight — 
and the mercury four degrees below zero. 



86 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

Lear was born in 1720, and vegetated eighty- 
two years. 

I take it that Timothy Winn, of whom 
we have only a glimpse, and woidd like to 
have more, was a person better worth know- 
ing. His name reads like the title of some 
old-fashioned novel — " Timothy Winn, or 
the Memoirs of a Bashful Gentleman." He 
came to Portsmouth from Wobm^n at the 
close of the last century, and set up in the 
old museum-building on Mulberry Street 
what was called " a piece goods store." He 
was the third Timothy in his monotonous 
family, and in order to differentiate himself 
he inscribed on the sign over his shojj door, 
" Timothy Winn, 3d," and was ever after 
called " Three-Penny Winn." That he en- 
joyed the pleasantry, and clung to his sign, 
goes to show that he was a person who 
would ripen on further acquaintance, were 
further acquaintance now practicable. His 
next-door neighbor, Mr. Leonard Serat, who 
kept a modest tailoring establishment, also 
tantalizes us a little with a dim intimation 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 87 

of originality. He plainly was without lit- 
erary prejudices, for on one face of liis 
swinging sign was painted tlie word Taylor, 
and on tlie other Tailor. This may have 
been a delicate concession to that part of 
the community — the greater part, probably 
— which would have spelled it with a y. 

The building in which Messrs. Winn and 
Serat had their shops was the property of 
Nicholas Eousselet, a French gentleman of 
Demerara, the story of whose unconven- 
tional courtship of Miss Catherine Moffatt 
is pretty enough to bear retelling, and en- 
titles him to a place in our limited collection 
of etchings. M. Eousselet had doubtless 
already made excursions into the pays de 
tendre^ and given Miss Catherine previous 
notice of the state of his heart, but it was 
not until one day during the hour of service 
at the Episcopal church that he brought 
matters to a crisis by handing to Miss 
Moffatt a small Bible, on the fly-leaf of 
which he had penciled the fifth verse of the 
Second Epistle of John — 



88 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

" And now I beseech thee, lady, not as though I 
wrote a new commandment mito thee, but that 
which we had from the beginning, that we love one 
another." 

This was not to be resisted, at least not by 
Miss Catherine, who demurely handed the 
volume back to him with a page turned 
down at the sixteenth verse in the first 
chapter of Ruth — 

" Whither thou goest, I will go ; and where thou 
lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my peo- 
ple, and thy God my God : where thou diest, will 
I die, and there will I be buried : the Lord do so 
to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee 
and me." 

Aside from this quaint touch of romance, 
what attaches me to the happy pair — for 
the marriage was a fortunate one — is the 
fact that the Rousselets made their home in 
the old Atkinson mansion, whi<ih stood di- 
rectly opposite my grandfather's house on 
Court Street and was torn down in my child- 
hood, to my great consternation. The build- 
ing had been unoccupied for a quarter of a 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 89 

century, and was fast falling into decay witli 
all its rich wood-carvings at cornice and 
lintel ; but was it not full of ghosts, and if 
the old barracks were demolished, would 
not these ghosts, or some of them at least, 
take refuge in my grandfather's house just 
across the way ? Where else could they be- 
stow themselves so conveniently? While 
the ancient mansion was in process of de- 
struction, I used to peep round the corner 
of our barn at the workmen, and watch the 
indignant phantoms go soaring upward in 
spiral clouds of colonial dust. 

A lady differing in many ways from 
Catherine Moffatt was the Mary Atkinson 
(once an inmate of this same manor house) 
who fell to the lot of the Kev. William 
Shurtleff, pastor of the South Church be- 
tween 1733 and 1747. From the worldly 
standpoint, it was a fine match for the New- 
castle clergyman — beauty, of the eagle- 
beaked kind ; wealth, her share of the family 
plate ; high birth, a sister to the Hon. Theo- 
dore Atkinson. But if the exemplary man 



90 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

had cast his eyes lower, peradventure he had 
found more happiness, though ill-bred per- 
sons without family plate are not necessarily 
amiable. Like Socrates, this long-suifering 
di^ane had always with him an object on 
which to cultivate heavenly patience, and 
patience, says the Eastern proverb, is the 
key of content. The spirit of Xantippe 
seems to have taken possession of Mrs. 
Shurtleff immediately after her marriage. 
The freakish disrespect with which she used 
her meek consort was a heavy cross to bear 
at a period in New England when clerical 
dignity was at its highest sensitive point. 
Her devices for torturing the poor gentleman 
were inexhaustible. Now she lets his Sab- 
bath ruffs go imstarched; now she scan- 
dalizes him by some unseemly and frivolous 
color in her attire ; now she leaves him to 
cook his own dinner at the kitchen coals ; 
and now she locks him in his study, whither 
he has retired for a moment or two of prayer, 
previous to setting forth to perform the 
morning service. The congregation has as- 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 91 

sembled ; the sexton has tolled the bell 
twice as long as is the custom, and is be- 
ginning a third carillon, full of wonder that 
his reverence does not appear ; and there sits 
Mistress Shurtleff in the family pew with a 
face as complacent as that of the cat that 
has eaten the canary. Presently the deacons 
appeal to her for information touching the 
good doctor. Mistress Shurtleff sweetly 
tells them that the good doctor was in his 
study when she left home. There he is 
found, indeed, and released from durance, 
begging the deacons to keep his mortification 
secret, to " give it an understanding, but no 
tongue." Such was the discipline undergone 
by the worthy Dr. Shurtleff on his eartlily 
pilgrimage. A portrait of this patient man 
— now a saint somewhere — hangs in the 
rooms of the New England Historic and 
Genealogical Society in Boston. There he 
can be seen in surplice and bands, with his 
lamblike, apostolic face looking down upon 
the heavy antiquarian labors of his busy 
descendants. 



92 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

Whether or not a man is to be classed as 
eccentric who vanishes without rhyme or 
reason on his wedding-night is a query left 
to the reader's decision. We seem to have 
struck a matrimonial vein, and must work it 
out. In 1768, Mr. James McDonough was 
one of the wealthiest men in Portsmouth, 
and the fortunate suitor for the hand of a 
daughter of Jacob Sheafe, a town magnate. 
The home of the bride was decked and 
lighted fov the nuptials, the banquet-table 
was spread, and the guests were gathered. 
The minister in his robe stood by the carven 
mantelpiece, book in hand, and waited. 
Then followed an awkward interval — there 
was a hitch somewhere. A strange silence 
fell upon the laughing groups ; the air grew 
tense with expectation ; in the pantry, Amos 
Boggs, the butler, in his agitation spilt a 
bottle of port over liis new cinnamon-colored 
small-clothes. Then a whisper — a whis- 
per suppressed these twenty minutes — ran 
through the apartments, — " The bridegroom 
has not come ! " He never came. The mys- 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 93 

teiy of tliat night remains a mystery after 
the lapse of a century and a quarter. 

What had become of James McDonough ? 
The assassination of so notable a person in 
a community where every strange face was 
challenged, where every man's antecedents 
were known, could not have been accom- 
plished without leaving some slight traces. 
Not a shadow of foul play was discovered. 
That McDonough had been murdered or 
had committed suicide were theories accepted 
at first by a few, and then by no one. On 
the other hand, he was in love with his Jian- 
cee, he had wealth, power, position — why 
had he fled ? He was seen a moment on the 
public street, and then never seen again. 
It was as if he had turned into air. Mean- 
while the bewilderment of the bride was 
dramatically painful. If McDonough had 
been waylaid and killed, she could mourn 
for him. If he had deserted her, she could 
wrap herself in her pride. But neither 
course lay open to her, then or afterward. 
In one of the Twice Told Tales Hawthorne 



94 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

deals with a man named Wakefield, who 
disappears with like suddenness, and lives 
unrecognized for twenty years in a street 
not far from his abandoned hearthside. 
Such expunging of one's self was not possi- 
ble in Portsmouth ; but I never think of 
McDonough without recalling Wakefield. 
I have an inexplicable conviction that for 
many a year James McDonough, in some 
snug ambush, studied and analyzed the ef- 
fect of his own startling disappearance. 

Some time in the year 1758, there dawned 
upon Portsmouth a personage bearing the 
ponderous title of King's Attorney, and car- 
rying much gold lace about him. This 
gilded gentleman was Mr. Wyseman Clagett, 
of Bristol, England, where his father dwelt 
on the manor of Broad Oaks, in a mansion 
with twelve chimneys, and kept a coach and 
eight or ten servants. Up to the moment 
of his advent in the colonies, Mr. Wyseman 
Clagett had evidently not been able to keep 
anything but himself. His wealth consisted 
of his personal decorations, the golden frogs 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 95 

on his lapels, and the tinsel at his throat ; 
other charms he had none. Yet with these 
he contrived to dazzle the eyes of Lettice 
Mitchel, one of the young beauties of the 
province, and to cause her to forget that she 
had plighted troth with a Mr. Warner, then 
in Europe, and destined to return home with 
a disturbed heart. Mr. Clagett was a man 
of violent temper and ingenious vindictive- 
ness, and proved more than a sufdcient 
punishment for Lettice's infidelity. The 
trifling fact that Warner was dead— he died 
shortly after his return — did not interfere 
with the course of Mr. Clagett's jealousy; he 
was haimted by the suspicion that Lettice 
regretted her first love, having left nothing 
undone to make her do so. " This is to pay 
Warner's debts," remarked Mr. Clagett, as 
he twitched off the table-cloth and wrecked 
the tea-things. 

In his ofacial capacity he was a relent- 
less prosecutor. The noun Clagett speedily 
turned itself into a verb; "to Clagett" 
meant "to prosecute;" they were convert- 



96 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

ible terms. In spite of liis industrious 
severity, and his royal emoluments, if such 
existed, the exchequer of the King's Attor- 
ney showed a perpetual deficit. The strat- 
agems to which he resorted from time to 
tune in order to raise unimportant sums 
remind one of certain scenes in Moliere's 
comedies. 

Mr. Clagett had for his d?7ie damnee a 
constable of the town. They were made for 
each other ; they were two flowers with but 
a single stem, and this was their method 
of procedure : Mr. Clagett dispatched one 
of his servants to pick a quarrel with some 
countryman on the street, or some sailor 
drinking at an inn : the constable arrested 
the sailor or the comitryman, as the case 
might be, and hauled the cidprit before 
Mr. Clagett; Mr. Clagett read the cidprit 
a moral lesson, and fined him five dollars 
and costs. The plimder was then divided 
between the conspirators — two hearts that 
beat as one — Clagett, of course, getting the 
lion's share. Justice was never adminis- 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 97 

tered in a simpler manner in any country. 
TMs eminent legal light was extinguished in 
1784, and the wick laid away in the little 
churchyard at Litchfield, New Hampshire. 
It is a satisfaction, even after such a lapse 
of time, to know that Lettice siu'vived the 
King's Attorney sufficiently long to be 
very happy with somebody else. Lettice 
Mitchel was scarcely eighteen when she 
married Wyseman Clagett. 

About eighty years ago, a witless fellow 
named Tilton seems to have been a familiar 
figui'e on the streets of the old town. Mr. 
Brewster speaks of him as " the well-known 
idiot, Johnny Tilton," as if one should say, 
" the well-known statesman, Daniel Web- 
ster." It is curious to observe how any sort 
of individuality gets magnified in this paro- 
chial atmosphere, where everything lacks 
perspective, and nothing is trivial. Johnny 
Tilton does not appear to have had much 
individuality to start with ; it was only after 
his head was cracked that he showed any 
shrewdness whatever. That happened early 



98 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

in his unobtrusive boyhood. He had fre- 
quently watched the hens flying out of the 
loft window in his father's stable, which 
stood in the rear of the Old Bell Tavern. 
It occurred to Johnny, one day, that though 
he might not be as bright as other lads, he 
certainly was in no respect inferior to a hen. 
So he placed himself on the sill of the win- 
dow in the loft, flapped his arms, and took 
flight. The New England Icarus alighted 
head downward, lay insensible for a while, 
and was henceforth looked upon as a mortal 
who had lost his wits. Yet at odd moments 
his cloudiness was iUmnined by a gleam of 
intelligence such as had not been detected 
in him previous to his mischance. As Po- 
lonius said of Hamlet — another unstrung 
mortal — Tilton's replies had " a happiness 
that often madness hits on, which reason 
and sanity could not so prosperously be de- 
livered of." One morning, he appeared at 
the flour-mill with a sack of corn to be 
ground for the ahnshouse, and was asked 
what he knew. " Some thino-s I know," re- 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 99 

plied poor Tilton, " and some things I don't 
know. I know the miller's hogs grow fat, 
but I don't know whose corn they fat on." 
To borrow another word from Polonius, 
though this be madness, yet there was 
method in it. Tilton finally brought up in 
the ahnshouse, where he was allowed the 
liberty of roaming at will through the town. 
He loved the water-side as if he had had 
all his senses. Often he was seen to stand 
for hours with a simny, torpid smile on his 
lips, gazing out upon the river where its 
azure rufQes itself into silver against the 
islands. He always wore stuck in his hat a 
few hen's feathers, perhaps with some vague 
idea of stiU associating himself with the 
birds of the air, if hens can come into that 
category. 

George Jaffrey, third of the name, was a 
character of another complexion, a gentle- 
man born, a graduate of Harvard in 1730, 
and one of His Majesty's Council in 1766 — 
a man with the blood of the lion and the 
unicorn in every vein. He remained to the 



100 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

bitter end, and beyond, a devout royalist, 
prizing his sboe-buckles, not because they 
were of chased silver, but because they bore 
the tower mark and crown stamp. He 
stoutly objected to oral prayer, on the 
ground that it gave rogues and hypocrites 
an opportunity to impose on honest folk. 
He was punctilious in his attendance at 
church, and unfailing in his responses, 
though not of a particularly devotional 
temperament. On one occasion, at least, 
his sincerity is not to be questioned. He 
had been deeply irritated by some en- 
croachments on the boundaries of certain 
estates, and had gone to church that fore- 
noon with his mind full of the matter. 
When the minister in the course of reading 
the service came to the apostrophe, " Cursed 
be he who remove th his neighbor's land- 
mark," Mr. Jaffrey's feelings were too many 
for him, and he cried out " Amen ! " in a 
tone of voice that brought smiles to the 
adjoining pews. 

Mr. Jaffrey's last will and testament was 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 101 

a wMmsical document, in spite of the Hon. 
Jeremiah Mason, who drew up the paper. 
It had originally been Mr. Jaffrey's plan to 
leave his possessions to his beloved friend. 
Colonel Joshua Wentworth ; but the colonel 
by some maladroitness managed to turn the 
current of Pactolus in another direction. 
The vast property was bequeathed to George 
Jaffrey Jeffries, the testator's grandnephew, 
on condition that the heir, then a lad of 
thirteen, should drop the name of Jeffries, 
reside permanently in Portsmouth, and 
adopt no profession excepting that of gen- 
tleman. There is an immense amount of 
Portsmouth as well as George Jaffrey in 
that final clause. George the fourth hand- 
somely complied with the requirements, and 
dying at the age of sixty-six, without issue 
or assets, was the last of that particular line 
of Georges. I say that he handsomely com- 
plied with the requirements of the will ; but 
my statement appears to be subject to quali- 
fication, for on the day of his obsequies it 
was remarked of him by a caustic contempo- 



102 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

rary: *'Well, yes, Mr. Jaffrey was a gen- 
tleman by profession, but not eminent in his 
profession." 

This modest exhibition of profiles, in 
which I have attempted to preserve no 
chronological sequence, ends with the sil- 
houette of Dr. Joseph Moses. 

If Boston in the colonial days had her 
Mather Byles, Portsmouth had her Dr. 
Joseph Moses. In their quality as hiunor- 
ists, the outlines of both these gentlemen 
have become rather broken and indistinct. 
" A jest's prosperity lies in the ear that 
hears it." Decanted wit inevitably loses its 
bouquet. A clever repartee belongs to the 
precious moment in which it is broached, 
and is of a Aantage that does not usually bear 
transportation. Dr. Moses — he received 
his diploma not from the College of Phy- 
sicians, but from the circumstance of his 
having once drugged his private demijohn 
of rum, and so nailed an inquisitive negro 
named Sambo — Dr. Moses, as he was always 
called, has been handed down to us by tra- 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 103 

dition as a fellow of infinite jest and of most 
excellent fancy; but I must confess that I 
find his liigli spirits very much evaporated. 
His humor expended itself, for the greater 
part, in practical pleasantries — like that 
practiced on the minion Sambo — but these 
diversions, however facetious to the parties 
concerned, lack magnetism for outsiders. I 
discover nothing about him so amusing as 
the fact that he lived in a tan-colored little 
tenement, which was neither clapboarded 
nor shingled, and finally got an epidermis 
from the discarded shingles of the Old 
South Church when the roof of that edifice 
was repaired. 

Dr. Moses, like many persons of his time 
and class, was a man of protean emplojTnent 
— joiner, barber, and what not. No doubt 
he had much pithy and fluent conversation, 
all of which escapes us. He certainly im- 
pressed the Hon. Theodore Atkinson as a 
person of uncommon parts, for the Honor- 
able Secretary of the Province, like a second 
Haroun Al Kaschid, often summoned the 



104 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

barber to entertain bim witb his company. 
One evening — and this is the only repro- 
ducible instance of the doctor's readiness — 
Mr. Atkinson regaled his guest with a di- 
minutive glass of choice Madeira. The doc- 
tor regarded it against the light with the 
half-closed eye of the connoisseur, and after 
sipping the molten topaz with satisfaction, 
inquired how old it was. " Of the vintage 
of about sixty years ago," was the answer. 
" Well," said the doctor reflectively, " I 
never in my life saw so small a thing of 
such an age." There are other mots of his 
on record, but their faces are suspiciously 
familiar. In fact, all the witty things were 
said seons ago. If one nowadays perpetrates 
an original joke, one immediately afterward 
finds it in the Sanskrit. I am afraid that 
Dr. Joseph Moses has no very solid claims 
on us. I have given him place here because 
he has long had the reputation of a wit, 
which is almost as good as to be one. 



VII 

PEKSONAL KEMINISCENCES 

The running of the first train over the 
Eastern Koad from Boston to Portsmouth — 
it took place somewhat more than forty years 
ago — was attended by a serious accident. 
The accident occurred in the crowded station 
at the Portsmouth terminus, and was un- 
observed at the time. The catastrophe was 
foUowed, though not immediately, by death, 
and that also, curiously enough, was un- 
observed. Nevertheless, this initial train, 
freighted with so many hopes and the Di- 
rectors of the Koad, ran over and kiUed — 
Local Character. 

Up to that day Portsmouth had been a 
very secluded little community, and had had 
the courage of its seclusion. From time to 
time it had calmly produced an individual 



106 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

built on plans and specifications of its own, 
without regard to the prejudices and con- 
ventionalities of outlying districts. This 
individual was purely indigenous. He was 
born in the town, he lived to a good old age 
in the town, and never went out of the place, 
until he was finally laid under it. To him, 
Boston, though only fifty-six miles away, 
was virtually an unknown quantity — only 
fifty-six miles by brutal geographical mea- 
surement, but thousands of miles distant in 
effect. In those days, in order to reach Bos- 
ton you were obliged to take a great yellow, 
clumsy stage-coach, resembling a three-story 
mud-turtle — if the zo'ologist will, for the 
sake of the simile, tolerate so daring an in- 
vention ; you were obliged to take it very 
early in the morning, you dined at noon at 
Ipswich, and clattered into the great city 
with the golden dome just as the twilight 
was falling, provided always the coach had 
not shed a wheel by the roadside or one of 
the leaders had not gone lame. To many 
worthy and well-to-do persons in Portsmouth, 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 107 

this journey was an event which occurred 
only twice or thrice during life. To the 
typical individual with whom I am for the 
moment dealing, it never occurred at all. 
The town was his entire world ; he was as 
parochial as a Parisian ; Market Street was 
his Boulevard des Italiens, and the North 
End his Bois de Boulogne. 

Of course there were varieties of local 
characters without his limitations : venerable 
merchants retired from the East India 
trade ; elderly gentlewomen, with family 
jewels and personal peculiarities ; one or 
two scholarly recluses in by-gone cut of coat, 
haunting the Athenaeum reading-room ; ex- 
sea captains, with rings on their fingers, like 
Simon Danz's visitors in Longfellow's poem 
— men who had played busy parts in the 
bustling world, and had drifted back to Old 
Strawberry Bank in the tranquil sunset of 
their careers. I may say, in passing, that 
these ancient mariners, after battling with 
terrific hurricanes and typhoons on every 
known sea, not infrequently drowned them- 



108 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

selves in pleasant weather in small sail-boats 
on the Piscataqua River. Old sea-dogs who 
had commanded ships of four or five hun- 
dred tons had naturally slight respect for 
the potentialities of sail-boats twelve feet 
long. But there was to be no further in- 
crease of these odd sticks — if I may call 
them so, in no irreverent mood — after those 
innocent-looking parallel bars indissolubly 
linked Portsmouth with the capital of the 
Commonwealth of Massachusetts. All the 
conditions were to be changed, the old angles 
to be pared off, new horizons to be regarded. 
The individual, as an eccentric individual, 
was to undergo great modifications. If he 
were not to become extinct — a thing little 
likely — he was at least to lose his promi- 
nence. 

However, as I have said, local character, 
in the sense in which the term is here used, 
was not instantly killed ; it died a lingering 
death, and passed away so peacefully and 
silently as not to attract general, or perhaps 
any, notice. This period of gradual dissolu- 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 109 

tion fell during my boyhood. The last of 
the cocked hats had gone out, and the rail- 
way had come in, long before my time ; but 
certain bits of color, certain half obsolete 
customs and scraps of the past, were still left 
over. I was not too late, for example, to 
catch the last town crier — one Nicholas 
Newman, whom I used to contemplate with 
awe, and now recall with a sort of affection. 
Nicholas Newman — Nicholas was a so- 
briquet, his real name being Edward — was 
a most estimable person, very short, cross- 
eyed, somewhat bow-legged, and with a bell 
out of all proportion to his stature. I have 
never since seen a bell of that size discon- 
nected with a church steeple. The only 
thing about him that matched the instru- 
ment of his office was liis voice. His " Hear 
All ! " still deafens memory's ear. I re- 
member that he had a queer way of sidling 
up to one, as if nature in shaping him had 
originally intended a crab, but thought better 
of it, and made a town-crier. Of the crus- 
tacean intention only a moist thumb re- 



110 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

mained, wliicli served Mr. Newman in good 
stead in the delivery of the Boston evening 
papers, for lie was incidentally newsdealer. 
His authentic duties were to cry auctions, 
funerals, mislaid children, traveling theatri- 
cals, public meetings, and articles lost or 
found. He was especially strong in announ- 
cing the loss of reticules, usually the property 
of elderly maiden ladies. The unction with 
which he detailed the several contents, when 
fully confided to liim, would have seemed 
satirical in another person, but on his part 
was pur© conscientiousness. He would not 
let so much as a thimble, or a piece of wax, 
or a portable tooth, or any amiable vanity in 
the way of tonsorial device, escape him. I 
have heard Mr. Newman spoken of as " that 
horrid man." He was a picturesque figure. 
Possibly it is because of his bell that I 
connect the town crier with those dolorous 
sounds which I used to hear rolling out of 
the steeple of the Old North every night at 
nine o'clock — the vocal remains of the co- 
lonial curfew. Nicholas Newman has passed 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 111 

on, perhaps crying his losses elsewhere, but 
this nightly tolling is still a custom. I can 
more satisfactorily explain why I associate 
with it a vastly different personality, that 
of Sol Holmes, the barber, for every night 
at nine o'clock his little shop on Congress 
Street was in full blast. Many a time at 
that hour I have flattened my nose on his 
window-glass. It was a gay little shop (he 
called it " an Emporium"), as barber shops 
generally are, decorated with circus bills, 
tinted prints, and gaudy fly-catchers of tissue 
and gold paper. Sol Holmes — whose ante- 
cedents to us boys were wrapped in thrilling 
mystery, we imagined him to have been a 
prince in his native land — was a colored 
man, not too dark " for hiunan nature's daily 
food," and enjoyed marked distinction as 
one of the few exotics in town. At this 
juncture the foreign element was at its min- 
immn ; every official, from selectman down 
to the Dogberry of the watch, bore a name 
that had been familiar to the town for a 
hundred years or so. The situation is 



112 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

greatly changed. I expect to live to see a 
Cliinese policeman, with a sandal-wood club 
and a rice-paper pocket handkerchief, patrol- 
ling Congress Street. 

Holmes was a handsome man, six feet or 
more in height, and as straight as a pine. 
He possessed his race's sweet temper, sim- 
plicity, and vanity. His martial bearing 
was a positive factor in the effectiveness 
of the Portsmouth Greys, whenever those 
bloodless warriors paraded. As he brought 
up the rear of the last platoon, with his in- 
fantry cap stuck jauntily on the left side 
of his head and a bright silver cup slung 
on a belt at his hip, he seemed to youthful 
eyes one of the most imposing things in the 
display. To himself he was pretty much 
" all the company." He used to say, with 
a drolhiess which did not strike me until 
years afterwards, " Boys, I and Cap'n Towle 
is goin' to trot out ' the Greys ' to-morroh." 
Though strictly honest in all business deal- 
ings, his tropical imagination, whenever he 
strayed into the fenceless fields of autobiog- 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 113 

raphy, left much to be desired in tlie way 
of accuracy. Compared with Sol Holmes 
on such occasions, Ananias was a person of 
morbid integrity. Sol Holmes's tragic end 
was in singular contrast with his sunny 
temperament. One night, long ago, he 
threw himself from the deck of a Sound 
steamer, somewhere between Stonington and 
New York. What led or drove him to the 
act never transpired. 

There are few men who were boys in Ports- 
mouth at the period of which I write but 
will remember Wibird Penhallow and his 
sky-blue wheelbarrow. I find it difficult to 
describe him other than vaguely, possibly 
because Wibird had no expression whatever 
in his countenance. With his vacant white 
face lifted to the clouds, seemingly oblivious 
of everything, yet going with a sort of 
heaven-given instinct straight to his destina- 
tion, he trundled that rattling wheelbarrow 
for many a year over Portsmouth cobble- 
stones. He was so unconscious of his envi- 
ronment that sometimes a small boy would 



114 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

pop into the empty wheelbarrow and secure 
a ride without Wibird arriving at any very 
clear knowledge of the fact. His employ- 
ment in life was to deliver groceries and 
other merchandise to purchasers. This he 
did in a dreamy, impersonal kind of way. 
It was as if a spirit had somehow got hold 
of an earthly wheelbarrow and was trun- 
dling it quite unconsciously, with no sense 
of responsibility. One day he appeared at 
a kitchen door with a two-gallon molasses 
jug, the top part of which was wanting. It 
was no longer a jug, but a tureen. When 
the recipient of the damaged article remon- 
strated with " Goodness gracious, Wibird ! 
you have broken the jug," his features 
lighted up, and he seemed immensely re- 
lieved. " I thought," he remarked, " I heerd 
somethink crack ! " 

Wibird Penhallow's heaviest patron was 
the keeper of a variety store, and the first 
specimen of a pessimist I ever encoun- 
tered. He was an excellent specimen. He 
took exception to everything. He objected 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 115 
to tlie telegraph, to the railway, to steam in 
all its applications. Some of his argu- 
ments, I recollect, made a deep impression 
on my mind. " Nowadays," he once ob- 
served to me, " if your son or your grand- 
father drops dead at the other end of crea- 
tion, you know of it in ten minutes. What 's 
the use? Unless you are anxious to know 
he's dead, you've got just two or three 
weeks more to be miserable in." He scorned 
the whole business, and was faithful to his 
scorn. When he received a telegram, which 
was rarely, he made a point of keeping it 
awhile unopened. Through the exercise of 
this whim he once missed an opportunity of 
buying certain goods to great advantage. 
"There!" he exclaimed, "if the telegraph 
hadn't been invented the idiot would have 
written to me, and I 'd have sent a letter by 
return coach, and got the goods before he 
found out prices had gone up in Chicago. 
If that boy brings me another of those tape- 
worm telegraphs, I'll throw an axe-handle at 
him." His pessimism extended up, or down. 



116 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

to generally recognized canons of orthogra- 
phy. They were all iniquitous. If k-n-i-f-e 
spelled knife, then, he contended, k-n-i-f-e-s 
was the plural. Diverting tags, written 
by his own hand in conformity with this 
theory, were always attached to articles in 
his shop window. He is long since ded, 
as he himself would have put it, but his 
phonetic theory appears to have survived 
him in crankish brains here and there. As 
my discouraging old. friend was not exactly 
a public character, like the town crier or 
Wibird Penhallow, I have intentionally 
thrown a veil over his identity. I have, so 
to speak, dropped into his pouch a grain or 
two of that magical fern-seed which was 
supposed by our English ancestors, in Eliza- 
beth's reign, to possess the quality of ren- 
dering a man invisible. 

Another person who singularly interested 
me at this epoch was a person with whom I 
had never exchanged a word, whose voice I 
had never heard, but whose face was as 
familiar to me as every day could make it. 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 117 

For eacli morning as I went to school, and 
each afternoon as I returned, I saw this face 
peering out of a window in the second story 
of a shambling yellow house situated in 
Washington Street, not far from the corner 
of State. Whether some malign disease 
had fixed him to the chair he sat on, or 
whether he had lost the use of his legs, or, 
l^ossibly, had none (the upper part of him 
was that of a man in admirable health), 
presented a problem which, with that curious 
insouciance of youth, I made no attempt to 
solve. It was an established fact, however, 
that he never went out of that house. I 
cannot vouch so confidently for the cob- 
webby legend which wove itself about him. 
It was to this effect : He had formerly been 
the master of a large merchantman running 
between New York and Calcutta ; while 
still in his prime he had abruptly retired 
from the quarter-deck, and seated himseK at 
that window — where the outlook must have 
been the reverse of exhilarating, for not ten 
persons passed in the course of the day, and 



118 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

the hurried jingle of the bells on Parry's 
bakery-cart was the only sound that ever 
shattered the silence. Whether it was an 
amatory or a financial disappointment that 
turned him into a hermit was left to in- 
genious conjecture. But there he sat, year 
in and year out, with his cheek so close to 
the window that the nearest pane became 
permanently blurred with his breath; for 
after his demise the blurr remained. 

In this Arcadian era it was possible, in 
provincial places, for an undertaker to as- 
sume the dimensions of a personage. There 
was a sexton in Portsmouth — his name es- 
capes me, but his attributes do not — whose 
impressiveness made him own brother to the 
massive architecture of the Stone Church. 
On every solemn occasion he was the strik- 
ing figure, even to the eclipsing of the in- 
voluntary object of the ceremony. His 
occasions, happily, were not exclusively sol- 
emn ; he added to his other public services 
that of fui-nishing ice-cream for evening 
parties. I always thought — perhaps it was 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 119 
the working of an unchastened imagination 
that he managed to throw into his ice- 
creams a peculiar chill not attained by either 
Dunyon or Peduzzi — arcades amho — the 
rival confectioners. 

Perhaps I should not say rival, for Mr. 
Dunyon kept a species of restaurant, while 
Mr. Peduzzi restricted himself to preparing 
confections to be discussed elsewhere than 
on his premises. Both gentlemen achieved 
great popularity in their respective lines, but 
neither offered to the juvenile population 
quite the charm of those prim, white-capped 
old ladies who presided over certain snuffy 
little shops, occurring unexpectedly in silent 
side-streets where the footfall of commerce 
seemed an incongruous thing. These shops 
were never intended in nature. They had 
an impromptu and abnormal air about them. 
I do not recall one that was not located in a 
private residence, and was not evidently the 
despairing expedient of some pathetic finan- 
cial crisis, similar to that which overtook 
Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon in The House of 



120 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

the Seven Gables. The horizontally divided 
street door — the upper section left open in 
summer — ushered you, with a sudden jangle 
of bell that turned your heart over, into a 
strictly private hall, haunted by the delayed 
aroma of thousands of family dinners. 
Thence, through another door, you passed 
into what had formerly been the front parlor, 
but was now a shop, with a narrow, brown, 
wooden counter, and several rows of little 
drawers built up against the picture-papered 
wall behind it. Through much use the paint 
on these drawers was worn off in circles 
round the polished brass knobs. Here was 
stored almost every small article required by 
humanity, from an inflamed emery cushion 
to a peppermint Gibraltar — the latter a kind 
of adamantine confectionery which, when I 
reflect upon it, raises in me the wonder that 
any Portsmouth boy or girl ever reached the 
age of fifteen with a single tooth left unbro- 
ken. The proprietors of these little knick- 
knack establishments were the nicest crea- 
tures, somehow suggesting venerable doves. 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 121 

They were always aged ladies, sometimes 
spinsters, sometimes relicts of daring mari- 
ners, beached long before. They always 
wore crisp muslin caps and steel-rimmed 
spectacles; they were not always amiable, 
and no wonder, for even doves may have their 
rheumatism ; but such as they were, they 
were cherished in young hearts, and are, I 
take it, impossible to-day. 

When I look back to Portsmouth as I 
knew it, it occurs to me that it must have 
been in some respects unique among New 
England towns. There were, for instance, 
no really poor persons in the place; every 
one had some sufficient calling or an income 
to render it unnecessary ; vagrants and pau- 
pers were instantly snapped up and provided 
for at "the Farm." There was, however, 
in a gambrel-roofed house here and there, a 
decayed old gentlewoman, occupying a scru- 
pulously neat room with just a suspicion of 
maccaboy snuff in the air, who had her 
meals sent in to her by the neighborhood — 
as a matter of course, and involving no sense 



122 AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 

of dependency on lier side. It is wonderful 
what an extension of vitality is given to an 
old gentlewoman in this condition ! 

I would like to write about several of those 
ancient Dames, as they were affectionately 
called, and to materialize others of the 
shadows that stir in my recollection ; but 
this would be to go outside the lines of my 
purpose, which is simply to indicate one of 
the various sorts of changes that have come 
over the vie intwie of formerly secluded 
places like Portsmouth — the obliteration 
of odd personalities, or, if not the oblitera- 
tion, the general disregard of them. Every- 
where in New England the impress of the 
past is fading out. The few old-fashioned 
men and women — quaint, shrewd, and racy 
of the soil — who linger in little, silvery-gray 
old homesteads strung along the New Eng- 
land roads and by-ways will shortly cease to 
exist as a class, save in the record of some 
such charming chronicler as Sarah Jewett, 
or Mary Wilkins, on whose sympathetic page 
they have already taken to themselves a re- 



AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA 123 

mote air, an atmosphere of long-kept laven- 
der and pennyroyal. 

Peculiarity in any kind requires encourage- 
ment in order to reach flower. The increased 
facilities of communication between points 
once isolated, the interchange of customs 
and modes of thought, make this encourage- 
ment more and more difficult each decade. 
The naturally inclined eccentric finds his 
sharp outlines rubbed off by unavoidable 
attrition with a larger world than owns him. 
Insensibly he lends himself to the shaping 
hand of new ideas. He gets his reversible 
cuffs and paper collars from Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, the scarabseus in his scarf- 
pin from Mexico, and his ulster from every- 
where. He has passed out of the chrysalis 
state of Odd Stick; he has ceased to be 
parochial ; he is no longer distinct ; he is 
simply the Average Man. 



INDEX OF NAMES 



PAGE 

Adams, Nathaniel 19, 7o 

Addison, Joseph ^ 

Allen, William ^^ 

Ananias ^^"^ 

Atkinson, Theodore 89, 103 

Austin, Rebecca '^^ 

Beaujolais, Due de ^ 

73 

Blay, Ruth 

92 

BoGGS, Amos 

Brewster, Chables Warren . 32,40,51,78,82,97 

72 
Bridget, Molly . 

go 

Brown, Bev. Arthur 

Brown, Captain Elihu D ^^ 

78 
Bruce, Cyrus 

Burroughs, Bev. Dr. Charles . . - - - ^'^ 

Byles, Bev. Mather ^"^ 

29 
Caroline, Queen 

Chadborn, Humphrey 

Charles, Prince 

Chastellux, Marquis de 

Clagett, Wyseman 

Copley, John Singleton "^ 

36 
D'Orleans, Due 

119 
DuNYON, William 

Elizabeth, Queen 



126 INDEX OF NAMES 

Fenton, John 59 

FowLE, Daniel 76 

FowLE, Pkimus 77 

Frankun, Benjamin 43 

FuRBER, Thomas 77 

George 1 60 

Gerry, Elbridge 49 

Gorges, Sir Ferdinand 6 

GuAST, Pierre de * , 4 

Ham, Supply 43 

Hancock, John 49 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel . . . . . 11, 93 

Hilton, Martha 51 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell 57 

Holmes, Sol Ill 

Jaffrey, George 99 

Jaffries, George Jaffrey 101 

Jewett, Sarah Orne 122 

Keais, Samuel 67 

Kekuanaoa 13 

Kenny, Penelope 73 

Knox, General Henry 49 

Lafayette, Marquis de 49 

Laighton, Albert 73 

Laighton, Oscar 25 

Langdon, Colonel John 34 

Lear, Benjamin 84 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth . . .50, 107 

Macpheadris, Archibald! 39 

McDoNOUGH, James ....... 92 

Mason, Jeresuah 101 

^L^soN, John 0, 63 



INDEX OF NAMES 127 

Mason, John Tufton 29 

March, Clement 72 

Mather, Rev. Cotton 69 

Meserve, George 18 

Michelangelo 65 

MiTCHEL, Lettice 95 

MoFFATT, Catherine , . . ._ . . .87 

MOLIERE 96 

Montpensier, Due de 35 

Moses, Joseph 102 

Newman, Edward 109 

Noble, Mark 47 

Odiorne, Eben L 32 

Packer, Thomas 73 

Peduzzi, Dominic 119 

Penhallow, Wibird 113 

Pepperell, Sir William 26, 80 

Pepys, Samuel 35 

Philippe, Louis 50 

Phippes, Thomas 67 

Phipps, Governor 42 

Pickering, John 20, 65 

Pitt, William 48 

Pottle, William 48 

Pring, Martin 1 

QuiNCY, Dorothy 57 

RocHAMBEAu, Count de 35 

RoussELET, Nicholas 87 

Rutledge, Edward 49 

Serat, Leonard 86 

Sewell, Jonathan 74 

Shakespeare 84 



128 INDEX OF NAMES 

Sheafe, Jacob 92 

Sherburne, Henry 30 

Shurtleff, Mary Atkinson 89 

Shurtleff, Rev. William 89 

Simpson, Sarah 73 

Smith, Captain John 3 

Socrates 90 

Stayers, Dame 51 

Stayers, John 45, 75 

Stedman, Edmund Clarence 26 

Stoodley, James 28 

Thaxter, Celia 25 

Thoreau, Henry Dayid 84 

TiLTON, Johnny 97 

TowLE, George William 112 

Walton, George 69 

Warner, Jonathan 40 

Washington, George 34, 83 

Webster, Daniel 97 

Wentworth, Benning 51 

Wentworth, John 39l 

Wentworth, John 2d 58 

Wentworth, Colonel Joshua 101 

Wentworth, Mary 39 

Wentworth, Michael 54 

Wentworth, Sarah ....... 39 

Westwere, Edward 65 

Whitteer, John Greenleaf 15 

WiBiRD, Richard 9 

WiLKiNS, Mary E 122 

Winn, Timothy 86 

Wither, George 5 

Xantippe 90 



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